anybody need a colour printer?

back in November, which is like three lifetimes ago to someone who can barely remember what she had for lunch, Darren the world-traveler put out the call for bloggers who were interested in taking a Brother laser printer for a test drive. being a blogger and someone who hasn’t had a printer of her own in over ten years, i jumped at the chance to support deforestation.
a few weeks later, UPS left one of those annoying sticky notes on the front door of my apartment building. after four phone calls and three more days of sticky notes, i had taken delivery of a very large (and very heavy) box containing the Brother HL-4050CDN Colour Laser Printer. did you know that a colour laser printer just barely fits in the back door of a 1991 Volkswagen Golf? neither did i, but i sure was glad considering i hadn’t yet removed the baby seat bar thing in the hatchback, so there was no way to get it home that way.
after squeezing it in and out of the car and then hoofing it up the Very Steep Stairs, my boyfriend and i went about the task of unpacking and setting up. my first impression was that it was much larger than i had expected. the dimensions of the box had me a little worried, but i lucked out and the unit fit almost perfectly in it’s designated spot in my “office”.
unlike the hype Darren advertised, the printer did not quite come with everything i needed for a two month trial. the major lack was any kind of printer cable. i was panicking, especially considering my printerless status of the past ten years. luckily, even without a spare parallel or USB cable, the printer supports connection via network cable (which i happened to have plenty of).
setting up the machine was a yummy piece of cake. the poster-sized getting started guide was easy to interpret and all components in the box were well-labeled. the biggest obstacle was our own inability to get the front door of the printer open. that sucker ain’t going nowhere without a lot of kinetic force, let me tell you! once we accomplished that task, i was quite impressed with the slide out toner tray into which you put each of the four cartridges. everything is colour-coded and easy enough for my mom to assemble on her own. after the physical pieces were put together, it was time to stick the CD in my computer. there were absolutely zero hiccoughs in installing the drivers and getting the Brother set up as my new default printer using Windows XP Pro. no more than 3 minutes later, i was all set to start printing… except i had no paper!
the next day, after procuring some dead trees, i was all set to print to my heart’s delight; and i did. recipes, knitting patterns, New York Times articles, there was more printing going on than at Gutenberg’s! double-sided, landscape, colour, black & white… you name it, i printed it in that first week.
then i got my electricity bill, which had a 600% spike in energy usage for the month of November and i immediately blamed the fancy new printer, unplugged it and stopped using it for well over a month. two utility bills later, there was a large credit to my account, so i’ve forgiven the printer and plugged it back in again.
it’s relatively fast to warm up, printing is fast and hassle-free, yet all is not perfect. one of the reasons i was looking forward to the test-drive was to utilize it to jump start my button-making empire. i’ve tried on several occasions, but i could never get the colour profile right. i can send digital images to photo labs both down the street and across the planet, but i couldn’t for the life of me get the printer at my elbow to render colours correctly. i don’t know if it’s my inexperience with colour profiling or a lack in the printer drivers, but i gave up my quest for photo-quality colour reproduction very early in the experiment. and it made me sad.
in my inexpert opinion, the Brother HL-4050CDN would be a fantastic printer for a small or home office, or maybe a student who tends towards the verbose in their essays. it’s definitely not for someone such as myself who has happily survived an entire decade without one and mostly wants to print photo-quality colour images.
update: unbeknownst to me, during the review period Brother decided that the reviewers could keep the printers after they’d written their reviews. thanks, Brother!