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 basic unit, if you can call it a basic 40ppm, A3, duplex, color laser MFP, could be upgraded with additional trays, staplers and also finishers; consequently, it can evolve along with its conditions when the needs change.
As you can anticipate, it is a heavy device, with a base weight of 140kg, so you will 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 practical style menu structure.
Almost everything within the control panel is certainly customizable, like the provided Jetadmin software. Privileges can be set regarding specific work requests, so for example you can 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 multi purpose tray will go down to A6. Two additional 500-sheet trays can be included and are also provided as standard on the CM6040f multifunction printer, which also offers built-in 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 single or double-sided, though the pages are mechanically flipped and re-fed to scan their back sides; this is because there is only a solitary scan head inside the device.
The all-in-one comes with an 80GB hard drive fitted as standard, and it’s pretty much essential for buffering files, but it’s also used to permanently store standard documents, to allow them to be printed without routinely sending them from your computer. Prints can be sent to the device and held until a PIN is entered on the keypad.
HP quotes the CM6040 MFP’s print engine at 41 ppm black and white, so we ran a mix of short and long documents with it to assess the condition. A five-page black print test took 29 seconds, as did the text and graphics project, giving real-world rates of just over 10 ppm for each. Increasing the number of pages to 20 generated a time of 51 seconds, equivalent to a page rate of 23.5 ppm, so you’ll have to produce a long document to get anywhere near 41 ppm.
Using the duplex setting, the 20-sided document was finished in 58 seconds, thus still over 20 spm, not to mention that switching to A3 made 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 from the four toner cartridges is very good on text as well as color images, with bold, powerful colors coupled with a brilliant shine on all prints, which we think is elegant, though opinions differ. Photographic prints have a bit of grain, but the colors are pure and there is a wide enough color gamut to handle very delicate differences in tone.