The HP Color LaserJet CM6040 Multifunction Printer is a replacement unit for the 9500 series and is designed for large workgroups or even modest departmental use. The base unit, if you can call it a basic 40ppm A3 duplex color laser MFP, could be upgraded with additional trays, staplers and finishers too; consequently, it can evolve along with your conditions as needs change.
As you might anticipate, it’s a heavy device, with a base weight of 140kg, so you’ll want to install it and find a position with good accessibility to the control panel along with the drawers. Any crucial part of the machine is accessed from the front, although you may need to access the sides in the event of a paper jam.
The widescreen black-and-white touchscreen is made to be easy to understand and makes very good use of icons and a handy-style menu structure.
Almost everything within the control panel is certainly customizable, as is the provided Jetadmin software. Privileges can be set with respect to specific job requests, so you can, for example, prevent emails from being printed in color. In addition, the unit automatically switches to black printing when it finds no color on a page, whether color is set as a print option or not.
Each of the two 500-sheet paper trays will print with paper from A5 to A3 and also the 150-sheet multipurpose tray will go down to A6. Two additional 500-sheet trays can be included and are also provided as standard on the CM6040f MFP, which also offers embedded direct fax. Paper is typically fed into an output tray directly below the scanner, though if you add finishing and stacking options, a transfer unit moves pages across these devices.
The scanner has a top-mounted 50-sheet ADF and will scan one-sided or two-sided, although the pages are mechanically flipped and re-fed to scan their back sides; this is because there is only one lone scan head inside the device.
The all-in-one comes with an 80GB hard drive fitted as standard, and is practically essential for buffering files, but is also used to store standard documents permanently, to allow them to be printed without the need to routinely send them from your computer. Printouts can be sent to the device and held until a PIN is entered on the keypad.
HP rates the CM6040 MFP’s print engine at 41ppm black and white, so we ran a mix of short and long documents on it to assess the condition. A five-page black test print required 29 seconds, as did the text and graphics project, giving real-world rates of just over 10ppm each. Increasing the page count to 20 produced a time of 51 seconds, equivalent to a page rate of 23.5 ppm, so you’ll need to produce a long document to get anywhere near 41 ppm.
Using the duplex setting, the 20-sided document finished in 58 seconds, thus still over 20 spm, not to mention switching to A3 did five color pages in 38 seconds. Although the printer is definitely no slouch, you have to consider the speed ratings on the spec sheet with much of the old NaCl.
The quality of the output with the four toner cartridges is very good for text and color images as well, with bold, powerful colors coupled with a brilliant gloss on all prints, which we think is stylish, though opinions differ. Photographic prints are a bit grainy, but the colors are pure and there is a wide enough color gamut to handle very delicate differences in tone.