The Territorial Army of the printing world (HP Laserjet 1200)

Member Name: Plymyphil

Product:	HP Laserjet 1200
Date:	09/06/04 (410 review reads)
Rating:

Advantages: Looks good, Robust, Reliable

Disadvantages: None to mention

So, without causing offence as I have neither the energy nor the inclination to respond to the frequent television and radio adverts, but this machine is to printing what the Territorial Army is to the country’s defence.

Let me explain. Over the weekend the Territorial Army take to the hills and do whatever they do to train for a possible wartime situation. The thing is – they’re not ‘real’ soldiers. (This is where genuine TA members can jump in and leave their response.) The Territorial Army is made up of groups of lawyers, teachers, doctors and other non-army occupations who join together to form a part time army. No problem there and in the name of national security we applaud you. However, ultimately these people aren’t really made for the army and spend most of their combat year – gathering dust so to speak.

Now, put is in a state where national security is at risk and all of a sudden the Territorial Army spring into action. With often-uncomfortable postings, regiments of the Territorial Army dust off their combats and do a splendid job for a few weeks and then once again fade into obscurity.

And now I arrive back at this printer. You see, we’ve owned this printer for a while now but it has been sat in an office where the PC hardly ever gets used and therefore the printer has been largely gathering dust. Every once in a while it shakes off its dust cover and spits out a couple of pages for practise, just to keep its eye in so to speak. Last week however the workgroup printer went down. Now the workgroup printer is the big mamma of our printing world, printing literally hundreds of pages a week. With no other alterative we whistled for back up and along came the HP LaserJet 1200 from the back office. Carefully manoeuvred into position by the worker of the back office, the HP LaserJet, never designed to be a workgroup printer, was placed in the firing line. For a full week the agony of fro
ntline printer action was levelled at it and hey ... it did pretty well. Apart from a couple of jams when it neared the end of its 260 page paper tray, the printer survived the week before hurrying back to its day job in the back office. (I guess its now doing the printer equivalent of lighting an occasional cigar, throwing its feet on the desk and boring the pants off the other peripherals with tales of daring and stamina.)

Seriously though – this is a personal printer and therefore not intended for vast outputs and yet for a short spell it performed just fine. That for me is enough to recommend this printer for small to medium enterprises. The long term printing has been reliable but as I said it is usually under used.

And so to the specification – this is for the techno. heads who may be serious about comparing this to other similarly priced printers.
We paid about £350.00 for this printer but that was six to eight months ago and prices have dropped since then.
The printer is a mono laser printer and offers the quality of build that would be expected from Hewlett Packard. It is quite light at 8.3kg and has a relatively small footprint. Its maximum resolution is an acceptable 1200X1200 dpi and it is rated at 15 pages per minute but my own experience last week says that real output as jobs begin to queue is more likely to be about half that figure. It has 8Mb of RAM on board which for larger print jobs is just insufficient and has the effect of slowing down the computer being used to print.
The printer ships with drivers for Windows 3.x/95/98/ME and Apple Mac OS 8.6 or later. It is also compatible with Microsoft Windows NT4.0 and worked just fine on a Windows XP machine using the NT drivers.

Overall: The printer is a good printer for lightweight use but wins brownie points and a reward for valour having performed a great role in the frontline of printing last week.

Hope this helps with your purchasing deci
sions and look forward to reading your feedback.

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