The HL-4040CN is one of a new range of colour lasers from Brother that are all, for the first time, powered by its own printer engine.

To show Brother means business, the price undercuts many others at just £352. This pulls it ever closer to home users and the unusual inclusion of a USB port for connecting Pictbridge digital cameras and memory sticks underlines these ambitions. An Ethernet port, which comes with SSL encryption, and a USB port for connecting directly to a PC, round up the connectivity.

Print resolution can be set to 600x600dpi or 2,400x600dpi. In our tests, text quality was solid but detailed photos lacked punch. There was also some banding in photos and all printouts were slightly curled at the edges.

The printer performed reasonably well in our speed tests, outgunning cheaper mono laser printers but lagging behind more expensive models. While many printers tend to fall short of their quoted print speeds, we found the Brother HL4040CN exceeded its 20ppm (pages per minute) rating.

When printing in mono, it achieved 23.80ppm and 20.35ppm on standard and best-quality settings respectively. It was a similar story for our colour and text PDFs - the speed faulted only on full-page photos, resulting in a lethargic 3ppm pace.

The printer uses a four-cartridge system, comprised of black, cyan, magenta and yellow toners. Black toner lasting 2,500 pages costs £38 with the other three cartridges costing £50 for 1,500 pages each. Based on five per cent coverage, printing costs 1.6p per text page and 3.4p per colour page, which compares favourably with inkjets and colour lasers.

The drum is an additional replacement, costing £110 per 17,000 pages, but this is still reasonable for domestic levels of use.