Brother HL-2040
The Brother HL-2040 is a compact and affordable personal laser printer that currently retails for $90 to $100. It can produce up to 20 pages per minute, and at resolutions of up to 1200x600 (where software dithering lets the manufacturer claim this matches up to 2400x600 levels). It includes both parallel and USB ports for easy PC connectivity as well.
The Brother HL-2040 is reasonably compact, with a front-accessible manual feed slot.
With dimensions of 14.6" x 14.2" x 6.5" (37.08cm x 36.07cm x 16.51cm) and a weight of 14.3 lbs (6.5 kg), this little printer is light and small enough to meet the space constraints of even cramped home office quarters. In fact, it's smaller than many inkjet models, and every bit as easy to move around. This little unit will serve its owners well, as long as their output needs are primarily for text and only secondarily for graphics or photos (which are not terrible in quality, but not as sharp and clear as we and most other people would like to see). Perhaps this reflects the printer's relatively modest 8 MB of built-in RAM or a shrewd decision to keep costs down by providing good text at the expense of halftone and graphics quality.
A 10/100 external Ethernet print server, the Brother NC2100p, is available as an accessory for this printer, though its price of around $180 doubles the cost of the printer itself. A drum cartridge is available for the HL-2040 for around $105, and produces up to 12,000 pages of output for excellent per-page printing costs. Considering that a conventional toner cartridge goes for about $60, and produces only 2,500 pages, the high-output drum is quite a deal by comparison.
