The HL-4150CDN is part of a new range of laser printers from Brother that offer colour printing at an affordable price and are designed for those who need a printer that can churn out a lot of documents on a daily basis.
This one is priced at around £300 and also has a duplexer, so it can automatically print on both sides of a sheet of paper.
Business-like design
Most manufacturers creating laser printers for business users don’t really bother themselves with trying to make their devices look aesthetically appealing, but with its cuboid design and white side panels, the 4250CDN is a bit more attractive than most, especially as the white contrasts nicely with the dark grey finish of the main body of the printer.
The control panel is quite basic, as it comprises just a two-line monochrome flip-up screen and a mere seven buttons, but the menu system isn't all that complicated, so it's still relatively easy to use.
One interesting feature is the secure printing functionality. You can add a security code to documents via the printer driver, so the printer will store them in memory until someone presses the Secure button and enters a passcode to release them. This is handy if you're in a shared office and need to print off more sensitive documents such as salary information or confidential letters.
On the front, just under the control panel, Brother has added a USB port. This isn’t for printing photos from PictBridge cameras, but instead allows you to print documents like PDF files and JPEG and TIFF images directly from memory keys.
Brother has added a duplexer to the HL-4150CDN which can work on two pages at the same time.
The bottom of the printer houses a slot in cassette-style paper tray that can hold up to 250 sheets at a time and there's a 500 sheet tray available as an option if you've got particularly demanding print needs. Above this tray, hidden behind a pull-down panel, there's a 50 sheet feeder tray for odd-sized papers and envelopes.
As with most laser printers, all the printed material gets fed into a recessed paper tray at the top of the machine and there's a small flip-up piece that helps to stop pages from falling off the front of the tray.
Quick installation
To get this model up and running, you first have to pull open a panel at the front to release the plastic tabs that protect the slide-out tray which houses the four toner cartridges.
Once you’ve done this you can load up the drivers on your computer (both Windows and Mac drivers are supplied) and choose one of two connection methods – Ethernet or USB (sadly, Wi-Fi isn’t supported). It's all pretty straight forward stuff, so no matter which connection option you choose you should be up and running in a matter of minutes.
Speed, quality and cost
For a colour model in this price range, the 4150CDN turns out to be a fairly pacey performer in terms of print speed. Our ten page black and white text document was delivered in 36 seconds, while a colour version of the same document took an almost equally speedy 39 seconds. Our colour graphics ten page test was a little bit slower at 57 seconds, but it was faster at our colour business presentation, producing this ten page document in a fairly rapid 35 seconds.
Brother has also added a duplexer to this model so it can automatically print both sides of a page. The duplexer actually behaves a bit differently than those on rival models as it can work on two pages at a time to speed up the process somewhat. This helped it to print a double sided black and white version of our text document in 54 seconds, which is a good speed for a duplex model.
The Brother HL-4150CDN produces decent prints, but colour accuracy is rather iffy.
The 4150CDN also puts in a fairly good showing in terms of print quality. Black and white
text, especially, is dense and cleanly formed. Colours are also rich and bold, too. However,
colour accuracy is a little off, with colour documents looking a good
deal darker than the original. One side effect of this was that orange blocks on our business
presentation were a little bit too red compared onscreen colours. Also, there was some slight
banding on large blocks of colour.
Running costs are quite reasonable, though. Using high capacity toner cartridges, a black and white sheet works out at 1.9p, while a colour page will set you back 8.4p. Both those prices include 0.7p for paper costs and work out cheaper than many competitors models with similar price tags.
Conclusion
Its colour print-outs may be a little bit dark for some tastes, but the 4150's modest running costs and fast print speed still make it a good bet for those who need to produce a lot of colour documents on a daily basis.
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Andrew_Field 21 December 2011
Good: This printer is fast, the color quality is excellent, Set up was a breeze, FAST printing, even in full color, Duplexer works great (on Windows), Network attached - LDP, IPP and JetDirect!
Bad: Duplexer doesn't work on Linux, Power draw/heat
Comment: I've owned this printer for a little less than a week now and have been very pleasantly surprised by it's performance. I've had great luck with Brother printers in the past and this printer has only reinforced my belief that Brother printers are well built little work horses.
Un-boxing it was a little bit of work as there are numerous packing pitfalls but certainly no worse than other printers. I don't mind as it's worth it for your printer to arrive functioning out of the box. I found the unpacking directions to be very accurate and I got it done in less than 5 minutes.
Set up was a breeze. I have it networked behind a wireless bridge and my network saw it right away. It was configured with a DHCP IP address without me doing a thing. I ended up assigning a static IP address (no drama there) as I find static IP's to be a more reliable method of connectivity for fixed hardware. That seems to be changing however and it would probably perform just fine on a home or office network with DHCP.
I have two Macs (running Lion) and a PC (running Windows 7) on my network accessing this printer. Set up on both OS's was a snap. The Windows 7 machines found the printer no problem using the network discovery method of adding printers. Both of the Macs I had to enter the IP address manually however. Having to enter the IP address manually may be an anomaly to my network configuration and the fact that my printers are networked via a wireless bridge.
I didn't notice a smell or excessive noise when printing, at least no more than any other laser printer. I have my printers in another room and a little noise is nice so I know the print job was sent successfully.
What prompted me to write this review was a photo I just printed on regular paper. It was stunning. Much better than I've seen on any other laser printer even rivaling our former inkjet. Keep in mind I'm not a graphic designer or photographer so my expectations may be a little low. If photo's are your goal a laser printer (at least in this price range) is not the right tool for the job. Regardless this printer does a surprisingly good job at printing photo's and from what I've read from other reviewers it gets better if you use photo paper. Of course I can't speak to that yet.
Obviously I can't comment on toner longevity yet. I will be annoyed if it does just stop printing once it decides your toner is "out" as a few other reviewers have indicated. Usually there is always more toner to be had in a cartridge your printer software deems "used up". There's a work around to reset the toner cartridge volumes which is explained by other reviewers. I hope that works. But before you will buy this printer, I suggest you have to check for best deal at:
From what I've seen the price for replacement toner is reasonable and even seems cheaper than many of the color lasers I've seen.
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