Although now discontinued, this review may be helpful to anyone looking to pick up a quality HP laser printer on Ebay or similar.
The HP LaserJet 2100 printer will satisfy anyone who is looking for the very highest in print quality and has an eye for good value ! True 1200 x 1200 dpi provides high quality laser output, at 10 pages per minute, not super fast, but more than enough for what I need.
Installation was an absolute doddle, although not USB Plug & Play, being an older printer, Windows XP knows exactly what to do with all necessary drivers included ! It's connected to my network with a mini print server (not reviewed here) on the parallel port via ethernet cable, although you can, of course connect direct to th eparallel port on your PC.
Load the paper tray with your paper (upto 300 sheets, a whole ream fits in no problems) or fold down the front flap for manual feeding of odd size paper, envelopes, labels etc, none of which I've had any problems with.
There are two output options: select either the top output bin (as I normally do) for a face-down capacity of a 150-sheets, or the fold out rear output bin (with a straight-through paper path, face up) for the most convenient output location.
There are a couple of lights on the front right on the top panel, one for power, that flashes when the printer's thinking about printing, and another one that goes red when something's gone wrong - normally just a paper jam from trying to feed crumples paper. There's a reset button, and a kind of manual feed.go button, that kick starts things.
Those rare paper jams are easy to resolve, with a top, front and back flap to open up the machine and extract whatever's clogging it up inside.
Cartridge life clearly depends on what cartridge you get, but I use this printer every day, and have to change the cartridge about once a year, a very simple job of opening the top flap, taking out the old cartridge, and slotting the new one in !
There are lots of additional features:
At the bottomright of the front panel, there's an infra-red port for printing from an IrDA-compliant device, such as a laptop, notebook computer, or a Personal Digital Assistant (PDA). HP Jetsend IR enabled devices can also use the IR port apparently.
Although the printer comes with 4 MB of memory that's always been more than enough for me, it can be expanded to 52 MB with the three available dual In-line memory module (DIMM) slots !
At the back, I believe there's an optional attachment for "duplexing", that takes a printed sheet and feeds it back into the printer for double sided printing. I've never tried this, so can't comment, but this could be a useful addition...
You can also get additional paper trays that the printer sits on to expand your printing capabilities - ie headed & plain paper for letters/continuation pages, but again, I haven't used this so can't comment.
Dimensions: (W x D x H) 16 x 17 x 9 in / 406 x 420 x 230 mm, Weight 25 lb / 11.5 kg (with cartridge)
(Note: I've marked "colour sensitivity" below as "Very poor", but that's because it's a black and white printer !) I hope this helps...
Apr 3rd, 2006
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