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HP Laserjet PRO P1606DN
by January
I have just bought a HP LaserJet PRO P1606DN for £169 due to my printer just packing up on me, well its been going for a while and i have been putting up with it until i could afford a new one and this is the one i bought from Curry's.
This printer is compatable with Windows 7, Windows XP which is what I have as well as with ... Windows Vista its easy to set up and comes with a handy instruction booklet which ids easy to follow.
Plug it in, connect the wires and add the disc and it installs the drivers and you just follow the on screen instructions. You have to buy the USB lead seperately, but its available from online at Ebay for a few pounds.
It comes with a black Laserjet cartridge, instruction booklet, paper tray cover and power cord. It prints on paper, does photo's and prints on envelopes as well as labels, postcards and prints on A4 A5 A6 and B5 which about covers everything you might need to print on.
It holds 250 sheets of paper and feeds the paper in when you have told it how many you want, I use it a lot to do my paperwork and invoices for work. I find it easy to use and the print is good quality, it do a few copies of my books at each time I use it.
It says in the instruction manual that it prints each page by seven seconds, which is about right and it isn't too noisy either, my old one could be heard downstairs when I was in my office at home and it took a while for each page, this is a lot faster.
Although the price is a bit steep it is worth the money as it is a handy machine for someone like me who is self employed and has to keep accounts, invoices and records of employment for the tax man. It also prints on both sides of the paper, so this saves money and it has an auotmatic powersaver built in.
if your looking to buy then this is a good option, a useful tool which is compatable with lots of computers. It gets an 8 out of ten from me. I also can buy the cartridges from Cartridge World where they are cheaper than normal priced cartridges, thus saving a little more money.
They only come in black so theres not a choice there, but it is a stylish model. You can also get online support from HP if you have any problems with your printer.
So far Ii have had no problems with mine, it is easy to use, was easy to instal and I have printed documents, copied photo's from my computer which have been very good quality and have used it for my files and invoices for my work at home. All the family use it for their printing and my daughter even emails me files to print off for her, so its a good all rounder.
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HP Laserjet 1200
by elyphant
The HP Laserjet 1200 is the printer I use everyday at work. It is a basic machine, and I think quite old now, but it does the job pretty well.
The printer is just as in the image above. It is not the smallest of machines - not at all like the compact printers that you can get - so you will need a fair bit of desk space to ... accommodate it. I have a fairly deep office desk and find that, when placed at the back of the desk, it reaches more than halfway to the front edge of the desk.
This is a black-and-white only machine, no colour printing here. However, the print quality is pretty good, and you can certainly get away with printing graphics on it if you don't need them to be in colour. For example, I have printed off maps from multimap, documents with logos and so on, and they have always been of perfectly acceptable quality.
The paper is loaded into a tray at the front, which is covered by a removeable clear plastic lid. I like the fact that you can see how much paper you have left, so you can easily top it up. If you do run out of paper, there is a status light on the front of the printer which will flash orange to warn you. It will flash whenever the tray is empty, not just if you run out in the middle of a print job, so you are reminded to fill up before you set anything else to print. I initially wondered what the transparent lid was for over the paper tray, until I printed a multipage document without it in place, and the pages started to curl back inside the printer. Hmm. So, leave the lid in place!
The printer is not overly noisy, but neither is it as quiet as a whisper. You can definitely hear it working away, but it's not so noisy as to disturb a phonecall for example.
Inkwise this takes big toner cartridges. As I use this machine at work, the toner gets ordered from the stationery stores, so I am not sure about how much it would be to buy. However, there is never a problem with availability as I think this same cartridge is suitable for a few different printers. The toner lasts well - I am not a heavy user of the printer, but would certainly print about 5 pages a day on average, and the toner lasts a few months.
There are very few problems with paper jams or malfunctions. The only times I have had trouble is when I've been using scrap paper - still A4 size, but already used on one side. This has occasionally caused a paper jam if it has had one curled up corner for instance, but I can't really blame the printer for this. In any case, it is easy to get access to the inside of the printer by opening the front cover and removing the toner, so it's not a problem to remove the offending paper.
Overall I would say this is a reliable day-to-day printer. I don't think I would necessarily choose to purchase this - I would prefer to find something a little smaller - but if you are looking for a basic machine that won't cause you any hassle, this is a good choice, and with being an older model I imagine you could find some good deals out there.
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HP Laserjet 1020
by davidbuttery
Normally I have no problems at all in reaching the minimum word count here, and in fact I would be very hard pressed to manage if it were a maximum! With the HP LaserJet 1020 printer, though, I am faced with an unfamiliar problem, that of what on earth to write about. You see, I could easily sum up this printer in a couple of sentences. ... Something like this: "This is an excellent workhorse mono laser for light to moderate text use. If that's what you need, than you'll be hard pressed to find better among its contemporaries."
Still, it seems only fair that I write a little bit more than that, so here goes. Firstly, consider the brand. HP attracts its fair share of negative comments, but if you look a little closer at those you'll find that in general the critics are talking about their colour inkjet printers. Those do seem to have some reliability problems, and my own experience with a substantial DeskJet would bear that out. However, the mono lasers generally have a much better record: they're simple things, without too much to go wrong, and for the most part they live up to that billing; this 1020 certainly does.
This is an old model now - it was first produced nearly five years ago - and indeed it's something like three years since its replacement (the slightly tweaked 1022) appeared. That being so, you're unlikely to find a 1020 sitting on the shelves of your local PC World. That also means that one of HP's best decisions - that, unlike many manufacturers, the initial included toner cartridge is a full one rather than an anaemic "starter" - is less important than it once was. However, both printer and toner are readily available second-hand for not much money; a cartridge should last for around 2,000 pages, which is reasonable though not amazing.
This is a very compact printer, something which those of us with limited space around their computers will welcome. It's a far cry from the bloated behemoths of the "all in one" combined inkjet/scanner/card reader/microwave (well, probably) units that are so beloved of the high street electronics retailers these days. Part of that is because the HP is a printer pure and simple: the only things you can plug into it are the USB cable and the power lead. I don't imagine that it needs saying that this is not suitable for paper sizes above A4, but there: I've said it anyway! Still, at least there's a separate feed for single pages that you can use without disturbing the main paper tray.
Print results definitely bear out the notion that this is a text rather than a graphics printer. Text looks extremely nice in standard quality, and even if you select economy (dark grey rather than black) it's perfectly adequate for letters and the like. Graphics quality is more uneven, and I wouldn't really recommend it for anything but the most informal of uses. The 1020 is also slanted towards small print jobs: it's notably prompt at printing out the first page - none of that interminable preparatory clattering here - but on longer jobs it slows a bit to avoid getting too hot: there's no fan. There's no duplexer, either, so if you want double-sided printing you'll have to feed the pages through twice.
I spend most of my time in Linux these days, and until relatively recently this was something of a problem, with HP's Linux support being widely derided. I had to install an unofficial third-party driver, which wasn't a big problem but which did require a certain amount of messing around on the command line. However, a year or two ago HP woke up and produced a proper Linux driver, which I have had no serious problems with. I have also had no difficulties using the 1020 in Windows XP, although I cannot speak from experience of what it might be like with Vista or 7 (or indeed MacOS).
I don't have any particular complaints about practical considerations of the printer in use. It's not at all loud, even if you have the printer right next to where you're sitting, and there aren't banks of annoying flashing lights to distract you. (Actually there are only two small lights, and no buttons at all on the printer itself!) The click when the machine returns to standby a couple of minutes after printing has finished can startle you if you're not expecting it, but that aside the HP's most notable feature is that you *don't* notice it. The 1020 simply does its job, without any fuss, and I'm very happy indeed with mine.
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