The Brother DCP-L2640DW is a compact all-in-one printer for home and small office use. Reviewers pointed to black-and-white printing at up to 20 ppm and wireless connectivity as the main strengths, with an automatic document feeder making the scanner more useful. There's no fax, and mobile printing options are limited. It's a good fit for anyone who wants reliable, budget-friendly printing with wireless convenience.
Full review
A 20 ppm mono laser all-in-one
The DCP-L2640DW is a monochrome laser multifunction rated at 20 pages per minute, with print, scan and copy but no fax. Monochrome is the defining constraint and the reason the rest of the machine is simple: no colour calibration, no four-cartridge supply chain, no colour-specific failure modes. For document work, that trade is usually the right one, because a mono laser produces sharper black text and a lower cost per page than any inkjet in the same bracket, and it does not dry out between uses. Anyone who needs to print a photograph, a coloured chart or a marketing sheet needs a different printer entirely; there is no partial workaround here.
An automatic document feeder does the scanning
The scanner is the part that justifies buying an all-in-one rather than a plain printer, and here it is fed by an automatic document feeder rather than requiring page-by-page flatbed work. For the actual home-office task this machine exists for, scanning a stack of receipts, a signed contract or a tax pack, the feeder is what turns a twenty-minute job into a two-minute one. Automatic duplexing means double-sided documents come out of the feeder and go back onto paper without manual reordering. It is unglamorous, and it is the single feature most likely to matter day to day.
The two-line display sets expectations
Control is via a two-line LCD, not a touchscreen, and the difference shows the moment anything goes beyond printing. Joining a wireless network, changing a tray setting or working through an error means scrolling text a line at a time with buttons, and video reviewers who set the machine up on camera spent most of that footage in the panel rather than on the printer itself. Once the driver is installed and the printer is on the network this stops mattering, because everything is driven from the computer or phone. It matters at setup, and it matters again on the rare occasion something needs changing at the machine.
250 sheets and nine paper sizes
Paper handling is better than the price bracket usually allows. The tray takes 250 sheets, which is half a ream and enough that most households will refill it a few times a year rather than weekly, and the machine is rated for Letter, Legal, Executive, A4, A5, A6, B5, B6 and Folio. That size range covers legal paperwork and international documents without a manual workaround, which is unusual on a budget mono laser and is a genuine reason to pick this over a cheaper stablemate. Wireless is the primary connection, so the printer can sit somewhere out of the way rather than tethered to a desk.
No fax, and mobile printing is thin
Two gaps are worth knowing before buying. There is no fax hardware, which is irrelevant to most buyers and disqualifying for the minority in medicine, law or insurance who still receive faxes. Mobile printing support is also thinner than on competing models, so printing from a phone or tablet is workable but less polished than the desktop path, and buyers who expect to drive the printer mainly from a phone should check the specifics against their devices first. At the list price this sits closer to mid-range machines than to entry-level ones, which makes both omissions harder to shrug off than they would be on a cheaper unit.
Strengths
- +Prints up to 20 pages per minute in black and white
- +Includes wireless connectivity for convenient printing
- +Features automatic document feeder for scanning multiple pages
- +Offers cost-effective ink usage with high page yield
Watch-outs
- −No built-in fax functionality
- −Limited mobile printing options compared to competitors
How it compares
The Brother DCP-L2640DW is more affordable and offers better ink yield than the HL-L2460DW, but it lacks mobile printing support and fax functionality, unlike the HL-L2460DW. It also doesn't match the speed of the Brother MFC-L3780CDW or the scanning capabilities of the MFC-L2900DW XL.
Rating sources
“Although it has all the shortcomings I talked about, I still think it's a great value for money printer.”
“overall it's a good printer for home use even in the office you can use it if you just want to print in the black and it is really fast”
Our 4.0 score is the average of these published ratings. Ratings marked * were derived from the reviewer’s written analysis or video transcript — the publisher didn’t print an explicit numeric score, so we inferred one from their own words. Click through to verify. More about methodology.
