The Brother MFC-9440CN is an excellent color laser multifunction printer for small offices and work groups. Its fast speeds, great print/scan quality, and large feature set are commendable. It’s not without its shortcomings, but they are minor. Compared with similarly priced multifunctions we’ve reviewed, such as the Lexmark X502n and the Xerox Phaser 6115MFP, Brother MFC-9440CN performs better for standard office use because it carries out all of its functions well. If you prefer asuper-high-quality prints, you may consider the HP Color Laserjet CM1017, but its slow print speeds won’t stand up to everyday office use. For everyone else looking for a multifunction that offers the features and performance that meet the wide-ranging needs of a busy office, we recommend the Brother MFC-9440CN.

The Brother MFC-9440CN isn’t the fastest laser multifunction , but it’s the most consistently fast across all tasks, It produced black text at a rate of 16 pages per minute (ppm), behind the Lexmark X502n’s 19.71ppm, but when printing grayscale graphics, it bested the Lexmark with a score of 15.21ppm. The Brother machine was the fastest with color printing, by far, when compared with similarly priced units, more than doubling some of the scores. It produced color text at a rate of 13.8ppm and color graphics at a rate of 15.53ppm.
Happily, the MFC-9440CN doesn’t sacrifice quality for speed. The black text prints were basically perfect, which is what you should expect of a $700 laser multifunction. The text is sharp and clean, and easily legible down to 2.5 points. Color text showed good color blending and well-rendered characters, but some of the text looked as if it was shrouded in a bit of haze. The color graphics print showed sharp details and nice saturation, but the colors were overly ruddy.

The Brother MFC-9440CN uses TN115BK black laser cartridge, and TN115C, TN115M and TN115Y color laser cartridge, and goes for about $130 each.

Overall, the Brother MFC-9440CN’s print speeds and quality to be great, more than good enough for standard office use.

The printer contain the four cheap toner cartridges (one black, three color) lined up in a horizontal row that use a single push-to-release tab for installation. HP provides a full set of cheap laser print cartridges in the box. A cheap black cartridge with a 3,500-page life span costs $123, while the color version is $121 for 2,800 pages. Strangely, there’s no mention of high-capacity cartridges available, so the cost-per-page equation factors out to 3.5 cents per black page and 4.3 cents for a full-color page–about average for today’s standard black prints and rather inexpensive for color prints. Finally, the CP2025n’s monthly duty cycle (maximum number of pages per month) is reported at 40,000 pages.

The HP cheap toner cartridge is quick to print color text and color graphics at 8.31 and 13.56 pages per minute respectively. Applied to real life, businesses printing a large portion of color documents will be satisfied with the print speed of the CP2025n.

The cheap black toner cartridge produces slightly more visually appealing text in smaller fonts than the cheap color toner, but remains true to the quality we expect from a professional laser. We’re particularly impressed with the graphical representations in our test subjects, which came out smooth and sharp.

The Lexmark X502n features a 366MHz processor and 128MB of nonupgradable memory. It offers both USB and Ethernet connectors, so it can be connected directly to a PC or on a network for a multiuser environment.

When copying, your options are standard: you can scale from 25 to 400 percent (preset or custom values); collate; and make 2-on-1 or 4-on-1 copies. There’s no duplexer, though, so you can’t make automatic double-sided prints

The Lexmark X502n basically is the fastest printer even compare to models that cost more. It cranked out black text at a rate of 19.71ppm (pages per minute), which was 5ppm faster than the $800 Xerox Phaser 6115MFP/N. The Lexmark X502 produced black graphics pages at a rate of 13.95ppm, a little slower than the Xerox, but still much faster than either the HP Color LaserJet CM1017 or the Samsung CLX-3160FN. With color printing, it was still the fastest of the pack, though not by such a wide margin: it produced color text at a rate of 6.97ppm and color graphics at a rate of 6.82ppm.

Often, great speeds come at the expense of quality, but happily, this isn’t the case with the Lexmark X502n. Its black text prints were basically perfect, which we would expect of a printer in this price range. Black graphics were also very good, marred only by faint horizontal lines. Color text was nearly perfect, though very close inspection revealed some inconsistencies in character formation. Color blending was very smooth, though. The color graphics print was a bit more problematic, but very good nevertheless. Color blocks were nicely saturated, gradients were smooth (though we saw banding in the grayscale gradient), and the photo elements were sharp and detailed. Our only big problems with this print were that the colors were a bit too ruddy and it had some problems handling barcode-style patterns.

Lexmark X502n color laser multifunction uses Lexmark C500H2KG high yield black laser toner cartridge, and C500H2CG, C500H2YG and C500H2MG high yield color laser toner cartridge which costs about $150 each