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May 01 2015
Hardware

Review: Brother MFC L2740DW Is a Printer with a Punch

The Brother MFC packs a lot of functionality into a relatively small footprint, perfect for midsize offices.
by

John Breeden II is an award-winning reviewer and public speaker with 20 years of experience covering technology.

The Brother MFC L2740DW is a high-resolution printer, fax machine, copier and scanner that can be set up almost anywhere. While it can be connected to a PC via a USB port, or to a network with an Ethernet cable, the printer has native wireless capabilities so all you really need is a power source to begin sharing the unit with everyone in the immediate area.

Once the unit is set up and powered on, all of its functions can be managed easily, either through an on-screen interface at a local connected computer or via the printer’s 2.7-inch touch screen.

Printing from the MFC L2740DW is high quality. Text is sufficiently dark and readable by default. Even when printed over graphics, letters are well formed with no odd spaces or gaps in the ink coverage. While the output is black and white, graphics look good with lighter images while dark colors represented well converted to grayscale.

The MFC L2740DW is also quite speedy, making it suitable for use in a medium-sized shared office without much danger of lines forming. When asked to print a 30-page text document and a 30-page test file packed with complex photos and graphics, the MFC completed the job in 1 minute and 12 seconds. There is no difference between the text and graphical printing times thanks to 64 megabytes of internal memory, which can fully load most documents before printing starts.

Because the MFC L2740DW can scan both the front and the reverse sides of a page at the same time, scanning is fast. Faxes take a bit longer, but the performance isn’t bad on the 33.6K fax modem: Tests with normal text pages yielded fax times of about three pages per minute.

POWERFUL
The MFC L2740DW packs a high capacity scanner, copier, printer and fax machine into a tiny package only 12 inches tall

EASY
A generous 2.7-inch LED color touch screen makes navigating features a quick process

WIRELESS
The MFC L2740DW comes with embedded wireless 802.11b/g/n connectivity so that documents can be sent to the device from anywhere within a few hundred feet

DIMENSIONS: 16.1x15.7x12.5 inches
WEIGHT: 25.8 pounds
DPI RESOLUTION: 2400x600
DRIVER COMPATIBILITY: Windows and Mac OS networks
MEMORY: 64MB
MONTHLY DUTY CYCLE: 10,000 printed pages
PAPER CAPACITY: 250-sheet standard tray

Brother, You Can Spare a Dime?

The compact Brother MFC L2740DW is more eco-friendly than most office equipment and designed to save money in consumables as well as energy costs.

At the most basic level, the MFC L2740DW is Energy Star–qualified. The power going into the unit peaked at 490 watts when printing, better than average for laser printing technology that must power up a fuser unit.

The printer consumes 55 watts on average when sitting in a ready state; however, it doesn’t stay in the ready state for very long, instead dropping into a light sleep mode that consumes only 5 watts of power. Being in sleep mode did not seem to hurt print time, with the first page of a new print job emerging just 18 seconds after being sent.

The MFC L2740DW can also save paper with an automatic duplexing mode that prints on both sides of a page without forcing a user to reload. It does this by letting a printed page emerge from the internal print engine before reversing and pulling it back to print on the other side. The feature adds a bit of time to the overall process, but not much. A 30-page document that took 1 minute and 12 seconds to print while using single-sided printing took 2 minutes and 2 seconds when printed on both sides, and that additional 50 seconds saved 15 sheets of paper.

The Brother MFC L2740DW is very tolerant of different paper types. In keeping with its eco-friendliness, the device is designed to work with recycled paper. Comparing the quality of the output on recycled paper to normal, bright office stock is actually difficult. Users may notice the difference upon careful examination, but recycled paper should be fine for most tasks.

In a final nod to environmental friendliness and economy, the MFC L2740DW can be set to toner-save mode, in which less toner is used on each page. While this setting makes photos appear a little lighter, text is still easy to read and perfectly suitable for most uses.

All these features in combination — use of recycled paper, toner save mode, sleep mode and duplexing — can go a long way toward reducing the burden on both the environment and an agency’s budget.

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