I have been using this printer for 10 months now and it has been an excellent buy. I have had no problems with it whatsoever. It cost around £250 and was one of Hewlett Packards 'entry level' printers. It looks good and at 8.5kg it is quite light compared to some other laser printers I have used in the past. It has 2 LED's for showing when the printer is ready or if there is an error and 1 button on the front for doing a self test print so it is quite basic in that respect (an LCD and menu buttons would have been nice). Size wise, it could have been better, it's not very high or wide (415mmm and 253mm respectively) but the 486mm depth can be a problem if space is tight. This is due mainly to the paper tray that sticks out the front and is one of the printers downsides. It is quite flimsy and feels like it's going to break everytime you fill it with paper. Talking of flimsy, the front door that accesses the toner cartridge also feels very fragile but the toner slides in with ease and it lasts for arount 2500 copies. It is a monochrome printer so no colour here, but that isn't what I bought it for. I used it for college work as the 1200dpi resolution, 19 pages per minute capability and the fact it is a laser printer meant that documents and diagrams looked very professional and came out a lot quicker compared to inkjet printers. Also, you can start print almost immediately after switching the printer on. The only down side to the print quality is when printing photos (but most people wouldn't be printing their photos in black and white anyway) they looked a bit grainy. The instruction manual is good but not really needed as I used the USB cable provided and Windows XP recognised it and done the rest. It also has a parallel port if required. Hewlett Packard have an excellent website offering technical support and updated drivers if required but although I browsed it, I have never had to use it. It isn't overly noisy in use and with toner cartridges (lasting around 2500 pages) costing from £5 on ebay to £50 in your local supplies shop it is very economical to run. Even considering the downsides ,this is a great printer that has been 100% reliable and I would recommend it.
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Nov 4th, 2005
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