Simple and reliable (HP Laserjet 1100)

Member Name: Spiros

Product:	HP Laserjet 1100
Date:	04/03/02 (1393 review reads)
Rating:

Advantages: Reliable, Solid construction, Overall very good for the money

Disadvantages: Image, Grabbing, Memory

I bought my Hp 3.5 years ago from new.
The price of it was quite reasonable for a printer, a HP laser printer.
The first thing you realize when you umpack is that is ... big. Looks like a chunky solid block. To its favor , the width of it is quite small and combined with the big height makes it quite practical for its size. Image is simple and classical in a way. Like a Volvo (well , sort of).

The built quality is more that good. Solid construction with quality materials used.
I even dropped it from 1.5 meters and made a small "dent" on a wodden floor! The printer still worked , as usual.
The only trouble that can give is "grabbing" more than one page. This usually indicates that the rollers need to be checked , but my opinion is that this is a design fault.
Sometimes can be annoying but it only showed this symptom after 3 years of operation.
Use a good quality paper and try to shuffle the pack a bit before putting it in the printer.
Apart from that it never brokedown, needed repair or even troubled me.

The whole drum/toner assembly is a bit pricey though. I paid (after 3 years) a total of £56 for the whole assembly. Up till then i had printed about 2150 pages in standard mode (not economy). Not bad.
A dixons salesman told me that i could buy the toner only for £25 if the drum is not damaged. Good trick, i might try that in the future.

It's not a gizmo printer with flashy lights and full of features. The latter are very limited to the basics.
The main idea on this printer is that. Simple, good and reliable.

Speed is very nice (8p/min) and quality of printing to usual -impressive- laser standards. Don't get fooled by the 600x600 resolution, this is a laser printer with far superior quality than any bubble jet (up till know at least).
Most importantly, quality is always the same.

Processing speed is not impressive though. The limited 2MB of memory ca
n frustrate you if you print a multipicture document. Get the memory upgrade.

People that need a reliable, simple and of good print quality printer could give an hp a chance. It does have an annoying habbit -sometimes - but it never lets you down.
If you need a compact printer with many features and high tech look then stay away.

Summary: