HP LaserJet P3005n

The HP LaserJet P3005N is an A4 black and white laser printer meant for office use. The company I work for had decided to standardise all printers to cut costs on toners and so they didn’t need to buy so many different toners. The main printer in use was the HP LaserJet 2420N but this was discontinued and superseded by the HP LaserJet P3005 printers so I decided on this one. The P3005 printers come in several flavours. There’s the P3005 (no network), P3005N (with network) and P3005DN (duplex, with parallel connection and network). All of them have a USB connection. The P3005N costs £436.98 at Dabs.com, with the DN version costing slightly more and I replaced four printers with P3005N’s across several sites.

The printer has two paper trays. The main tray can hold 600 sheets of paper, which is one ream of 500 sheets of paper and a fifth so it’s not bad, as it holds more than its predecessor, the 2420N. This suggests that it’s capable of higher volume printing, making this a good choice for use in an office with a workgroup of about five or more people. I am able to log into the printers using its network card’s IP address to change settings and view the usage statistics. Looking at the print usage page, they show that most of them have printed around 20,000 plus pages since they were bought and installed five months ago so they have been averaging 4,000 printouts a month, which shows how robust these printers are.

PRINTING

This printer is extremely fast and can print around 35 pages per minute. Print quality is also excellent with both official and compatible toner cartridges. One thing is a bit annoying though is that sometimes if it’s expecting a different paper size, it stops printing and the users usually just randomly press the green button to get it going again without bothering to read the display. They usually end up changing the default paper size.

Other times, I’ve found that people somehow manage to send a print job to Tray 1, which is the manual feed tray at the top and it stops printing because there’s no paper in the manual feed tray. This stops everyone else from printing. The default setting is for the printer to Automatically Select the print tray and most users don’t know how to choose which tray to print to so it should just go to Tray 2, the main paper tray. Maybe the drivers are a bit stupid? I would have preferred for the printer’s menus to be a little bit more user friendly for non-IT literate users so they’d stop bugging me but it’s a minor niggle as it doesn’t happen that often.

RUNNING COSTS

The standard toner (Q7551A) original toner costs around £120 and yields around £6,500 pages, and about £60 for a compatible cartridge.

The higher capacity original toner (Q7551X) costs around £190 and yields around £13,000 pages, and about £70 for a compatible.

With those prices in mind, you’re better off buying the compatibles. I’m not sure if they do void the warranty or not but if they do mess up the printer, just stick an original toner back in before sending back to HP for repairs.

CUSTOMER SUPPORT

I have had a problem with one of them a month ago whereby it kept crashing. Turning it off and on started it printing again but it kept having the same problem so I contacted HP to try to fix it over the phone. I was walked through doing a firmware upgrade but it didn’t fix the problem so I had to send it back to HP to get it repaired. They arrange a collection with DHL and got the printer back a week later. This would be a problem if the printer was operation critical so I would advise having a spare printer handy or have more than one set up so you can print to the other one whilst the faulty one is repaired. A lot of suppliers offer a service contract though so that a printer engineer would show up on the day or the next day to fix it onsite problems but this is usually quite expensive. Drivers for this printer can be downloaded from the HP website and download speeds are usually very good so no problems even if you don’t have the original CD that came with the printer.

When the printer requires a service from the wear and tear, the most common parts that require replacing are the fuser, pick up rollers and gears. Unlike cheaper printers, these are serviceable unless something is seriously wrong. Even if that were the case, they come with a two year warranty for peace of mind with HP providing very good support.

SUMMARY

PROS

- Fast
- Robust
- Network
- Serviceable
- HP Customer service
- 2 Year Warranty
- Big paper tray

CONS

- Initial cost of printer
- Expensive official toners
- Options on the printer a bit annoying
- Motherboard more prone to problems than the predecessor

VERDICT

This is an excellent robust printer for offices and even in warehouses that requires printing medium to high volumes. The initial purchase price is high and so are toner prices unless you buy compatibles but considering the page yield the toners are capable of, it may just be worth considering for a home office as you wouldn’t need to replace the toner cartridge for ages. Customer service is good and the printer is easy to set up and configure on a network (for techies at least). Most people would still be able to set it up using USB though. This particular model does appear to be more prone to motherboard problems as I've seen 3 or 4 of them develop problems, usually after the warranty has run out so it's not perfect. While it works though, it's pretty good. It has now been discontinued and replaced with the P3015dn, which I'd recommend in it's place.

Thanks for reading!