Full Review

The bulk of printing done in offices are documents containing black text – for a small workgroup or for professionals working out of homes who generate reports, a monochrome laser printer suits the requirement best – they are not only inexpensive, costing not much more than a home inkjet MFD, their running costs are considerably lower than inkjets, have a higher duty cycle and are compact as well. In this category it is hard to argue with a printer that costs only about Rs. 7,000 and has a very reasonable printing cost of Rs. 1.50. And, it’s not like quality is compromised – it produced excellent text print outs that had sharp edges and did not have any signs of graininess or streaks. The black ink contrasted well against the white paper, making the text stand out. Even a point size 2 text was visible when viewed under a magnifying glass. This Brother was not the fastest in our tests, but fast enough for all intended applications. The spool time was a short 11 seconds (measured from the instant the print command was executed on the PC to the instant the printout landed in the output tray). Thereafter, we measured the printing speed in normal mode (printing from a Word file, A4 sized pages, filled with text) to be 15ppm – this speed should keep most users happy. The Brother ML-2140 wasn’t great with grayscale images (like those that are part of PPTs), but thanks to the toner intensity control in the driver, this could be overcome to some extent.

In this category it is hard to argue with a printer that costs only about Rs. 7,000 and has a very reasonable printing cost of Rs. 1.50.

Bottom Line

If you don’t need network connectivity, the Brother ML-2140 is the laser printer to get for printing black documents. It’s inexpensive to buy and run.