Customer Rating: 
Summary: Love this printer, but ...
Comment: I haven't run into any of the problems mentioned by a few reviewers. I love the speed and quality of this printer for the price. It's worked very well with both text and images. And upgrading the memory was a piece of cake, and well worth doing.
The only reason I'm not giving it 5 stars is that, after you've printed PLENTY of pages, it starts hassling you about the toner cartridge. That is, it won't print even when the pages are still coming out with plenty of toner. I keep having to fiddle with it just to get out another few pages. And YES, I am using a Brother toner cartridge and not some "compatible" cartridge.
I would appreciate having it tell me when I'm low on toner, but don't like that it keeps me from printing when the pages still look good. Now, off to order a toner cartridge. ...
Customer Rating:
Summary: Good priner possible failure prone
Comment: During my first year of use this pritner was good to very good I used it for light office printing, maybe 5- 10 pages a day. At about 13 months just out of warranty it failed. Brother was unable to fix it. This was while it was still on its first toner cartridge (original one that came with it. I think it would be a fine pinter If you buy a 2 or 3 year warranty. Also the manual paper feed rarely worked but usually jammed or failed to take the paper and print to it. Maybe i should have given it 2 stars but it was a good printer for 1 year and with the way things are made today and for the price paid this is what we should expect I guess. Im going to get a Brother 5140 but im going to buy that waranty just in case. I also have had a HP 2600N color laser which after a few months of use is great but kind of slow at only 8 pages a minute or less.
Customer Rating:
Summary: Excellent for the money
Comment: I've owned four of these for a business we run. The print quality issues are easily solved by visiting Brother's Web site. It's usually something as simple as replacing the toner (when it's out), cleaning the drum with a Q-tip, etc.
Customer Rating:
Summary: Worst printer I have ever owned
Comment: My old HP Laserjet 4L worked for about 15 years. In fact it is still working today (I have never needed to replace the drum on it, btw). My Brother 1440 lasted 8 months.
It was quite nice when it was working - fast with good quality text. But that nice quality text goes down quite a bit when your entire page is smudged and streaked. It was sometimes so bad you couldn't read the text and my printouts resembled a bad photocopy.
Like many others, I will never own a "Brother anything" again. In fact I recently traded in this piece of junk to HP as part of HP's 2006 fall laser printer trade-in program, and got $75 towards a nice HP laser. So I guess the Brother did come in useful after all...
Customer Rating:
Summary: Great Laster Printer!
Comment: I've had this printer for many years. I'm not a real heavy printer, but when I've got a large print job, this printer is a workhorse. It is pretty quick to come out of sleep mode, and I've never had a single paper jam. That's more than I can say for many of the HP's I've used over the years.
The memory was very easy to upgrade. I do wish it had a larger capacity paper tray, but considering I paid less than a hundred bucks for this printer that is a very minor issue.
One of my favorite aspects of this printer is that it is very well supported in Linux, and even the Windows drivers don't load up your system with useless, memory-hogging utilities.
The build quality is surprisingly good, without being too heavy.
I highly recommend this printer.
Summary: Love this printer, but ...
Comment: I haven't run into any of the problems mentioned by a few reviewers. I love the speed and quality of this printer for the price. It's worked very well with both text and images. And upgrading the memory was a piece of cake, and well worth doing.
The only reason I'm not giving it 5 stars is that, after you've printed PLENTY of pages, it starts hassling you about the toner cartridge. That is, it won't print even when the pages are still coming out with plenty of toner. I keep having to fiddle with it just to get out another few pages. And YES, I am using a Brother toner cartridge and not some "compatible" cartridge.
I would appreciate having it tell me when I'm low on toner, but don't like that it keeps me from printing when the pages still look good. Now, off to order a toner cartridge. ...
Customer Rating:
Summary: Good priner possible failure prone
Comment: During my first year of use this pritner was good to very good I used it for light office printing, maybe 5- 10 pages a day. At about 13 months just out of warranty it failed. Brother was unable to fix it. This was while it was still on its first toner cartridge (original one that came with it. I think it would be a fine pinter If you buy a 2 or 3 year warranty. Also the manual paper feed rarely worked but usually jammed or failed to take the paper and print to it. Maybe i should have given it 2 stars but it was a good printer for 1 year and with the way things are made today and for the price paid this is what we should expect I guess. Im going to get a Brother 5140 but im going to buy that waranty just in case. I also have had a HP 2600N color laser which after a few months of use is great but kind of slow at only 8 pages a minute or less.
Customer Rating:
Summary: Excellent for the money
Comment: I've owned four of these for a business we run. The print quality issues are easily solved by visiting Brother's Web site. It's usually something as simple as replacing the toner (when it's out), cleaning the drum with a Q-tip, etc.
Customer Rating:
Summary: Worst printer I have ever owned
Comment: My old HP Laserjet 4L worked for about 15 years. In fact it is still working today (I have never needed to replace the drum on it, btw). My Brother 1440 lasted 8 months.
It was quite nice when it was working - fast with good quality text. But that nice quality text goes down quite a bit when your entire page is smudged and streaked. It was sometimes so bad you couldn't read the text and my printouts resembled a bad photocopy.
Like many others, I will never own a "Brother anything" again. In fact I recently traded in this piece of junk to HP as part of HP's 2006 fall laser printer trade-in program, and got $75 towards a nice HP laser. So I guess the Brother did come in useful after all...
Customer Rating:
Summary: Great Laster Printer!
Comment: I've had this printer for many years. I'm not a real heavy printer, but when I've got a large print job, this printer is a workhorse. It is pretty quick to come out of sleep mode, and I've never had a single paper jam. That's more than I can say for many of the HP's I've used over the years.
The memory was very easy to upgrade. I do wish it had a larger capacity paper tray, but considering I paid less than a hundred bucks for this printer that is a very minor issue.
One of my favorite aspects of this printer is that it is very well supported in Linux, and even the Windows drivers don't load up your system with useless, memory-hogging utilities.
The build quality is surprisingly good, without being too heavy.
I highly recommend this printer.