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Brother MFC-L2740DW Review

3.5
Good

The Bottom Line

The Brother MFC-L2740DW monochrome laser multifunction printer (MFP) is packed with advanced features and is suitable for use as a shared printer or for heavy-duty personal use.

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Pros

  • Prints, scans, faxes, copies.
  • Automatic document feeder.
  • Duplex (two-sided) printing and scanning.
  • Ethernet, Wi-Fi, and Wi-Fi Direct.

Cons

  • Output quality is at the low end of the range for monochrome laser MFPs, though it's still acceptable.

The Brother MFC-L2740DW ($299.99) delivers a lot more than you might expect from a monochrome laser multifunction printer (MFP) that's small enough to share a desk with. Its speed and paper capacity are suitable for heavy-duty personal use or light- to moderate-duty use as a shared printer in a micro office, and it's packed with features, including duplex (two-sided) scanning. The output quality is at the low end of the range for a monochrome laser, but it's still good enough most business use. If that's acceptable for your needs, the MFC-L2740DW ($700.82 at Amazon) can be a strong contender.

Like the Brother MFC-L2700DW ($569.99 at Amazon) , the MFC-L2740DW's suitability for moderate-duty use in a micro office is built primarily on paper handling. For printing, it offers a 250-sheet paper tray, a single-sheet manual feed, and a duplexer (for two-sided printing). For scanning, it offers a letter-size flatbed and a 35-sheet automatic document feeder (ADF) that can handle up to legal-size paper.

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Brother MFC-L2740DW

The printer also goes a step beyond its less expensive counterpart by letting you scan in duplex. Even better, it scans both sides of the page at the same time. That gives it a speed advantage over otherwise equivalent MFPs with duplexing ADFs, which scan one side and then turn the page over to scan the second side. As with most MFPs that can both scan and print in duplex, front-panel menu options let you copy both single- and double-sided originals to your choice of single- or double-sided copies.

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MFP Basics and Extras
Basic MFP features for the MFC-L2740DW include printing and faxing from, as well as scanning to, a PC. It can also work as a standalone copier and fax machine, and can send scans as email attachments without needing a PC. Extras include support for mobile printing and scanning, as well as the ability to connect to selected cloud sites.

Connect the printer to a network, by either Ethernet or Wi-Fi, and—assuming the network is connected to the Internet—you can print through the cloud, as well as connect to and both print from or scan to a tablet or smartphone through an access point on the network. Connect it to a single PC by USB cable instead, and you won't be able to print through the cloud, but you can take advantage of the printer's Wi-Fi Direct capability to connect directly for printing and scanning.

Other choices on the touch-screen menu include Web-connection options that let you both scan to and print from a selection of websites (including Dropbox, Google Drive, Evernote, and OneDrive). More interesting, and potentially more useful, is the ability to scan to specific file formats—including Word, Excel, and PowerPoint—and save the file to a cloud site or send it as an email attachment, directly from the printer's front panel. I tried scanning to both Word and Excel formats, and confirmed the feature worked well enough to be useful.

Brother MFC-L2740DW

Setup, Speed, and Output Quality
Setting up the MFC-L2740DW on a network is standard fare. The printer measures only 12.5 by 16.1 by 15.7 inches (HWD), making it easy to find room for, and it weighs 25 pounds 13 ounces, making it easy for one person to move into place. For my tests, I connected it using its Ethernet port and installed the software on a system running Windows Vista.

The engine rating for the MFC-L2740DW is 32 pages per minute (ppm), which is the speed you should see when printing text documents with little or no formatting. On our business applications suite (timed with QualityLogic's hardware and software), it came in at 9.2ppm, which makes it essentially tied with the Brother MFC-L2700DW. More significantly, it's a bit slower than the Samsung Multifunction Xpress M2875FW ( at Amazon) , which came in at 10ppm, and is our Editors' Choice for a monochrome laser MFP for heavy-duty personal or light- to medium-duty shared use in a micro office.

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Output quality is not a strong point. Text, graphics, and photos are all good enough for most business use, but text and photos are both a small step below par, and graphics are at the low end of the range that includes the vast majority of monochrome laser MFPs.

That translates to text output being good enough for almost any business use, as long as you don't have an unusual need for small fonts. Graphics are only a little less usable. I wouldn't hand the output to a client or customer I was trying to impress with a sense of my professionalism, but the quality is certainly good enough for any internal business need. Photo quality is good enough to print recognizable images from photos on Web pages, but nothing more demanding than that.

If you need better output quality, particularly for text, you'll be better off with the Editors' Choice Samsung M2875FW, which will also give you slightly faster speed than the Brother MFC-L2740DW. Alternatively, if you don't need particularly high-quality output, but also don't need the MFC-L2740DW's duplex scanning and its Web-connect features, the Brother MFC-L2700DW will give you much the same basic MFP capability for a lower cost. For offices that can make good use of its advanced features, however, the MFC-L2740DW can be a tempting choice.

Brother MFC-L2740DW
3.5
Pros
  • Prints, scans, faxes, copies.
  • Automatic document feeder.
  • Duplex (two-sided) printing and scanning.
  • Ethernet, Wi-Fi, and Wi-Fi Direct.
View More
Cons
  • Output quality is at the low end of the range for monochrome laser MFPs, though it's still acceptable.
The Bottom Line

The Brother MFC-L2740DW monochrome laser multifunction printer (MFP) is packed with advanced features and is suitable for use as a shared printer or for heavy-duty personal use.

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About M. David Stone

Contributing Editor

Most of my current work for PCMag is about printers and projectors, but I've covered a wide variety of other subjects—in more than 4,000 pieces, over more than 40 years—including both computer-related areas and others ranging from ape language experiments, to politics, to cosmology, to space colonies. I've written for PCMag.com from its start, and for PC Magazine before that, as a Contributor, then a Contributing Editor, then as the Lead Analyst for Printers, Scanners, and Projectors, and now, after a short hiatus, back to Contributing Editor.

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Brother MFC-L2740DW $700.82 at Amazon
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