| Product: |
HP Laserjet 2100 |
| Date: |
18/04/04 (764 review reads) |
| Rating: |
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Advantages: Sharp print quality, Reliability, Speed
Disadvantages: Discontinued model
Well here I am advising you on another laser printer!
This time I?m looking at the Hewlett Packard 2100 laser printer. This is an excellent model that has been available on the market for about 3 years now
The price our IT Department paid for this printer was around £350, but I believe the model has now been superseded, so you may have to purchase a reconditioned or second hand model if you want one of these printers.
Specs
At the time of purchase, this printer had a decent specification level for the money and the spec level still looks pretty good now, almost three years down the line!
Printer resolution is 1200 x 1200 dpi and mono print speed is 10 pages per minute maximum. The printer has a 66Mhz processor and 4 MB of memory on board which is adequate enough to deal with most office print tasks.
This printer accepts the following page sizes: Letter, legal, index card, A4, B5, A5, Monarch, C5, Com-10.
There are two printer trays available, the top paper feeder tray can hold up to 100 sheets, and the bottom printer tray can hold up to 250 sheets of paper.
The dimensions of the printer are (WxHxD) 16" x 17" x 9" and it weighs in at 11.5 kg, which is fairly manageable for moving around the place!
The printer has an IEEE 1284-compliant bidirectional parallel and 1 open EIO slot interface connections. It also has an Infra red receiver on the front panel of the printer.
Oh yes and finally the colour, well surprise, surprise, it?s beige!!
In Use
Like all HP Laserjet printers, the set up process is fairly simple. The printer comes with a set of drivers on a CD and these need to be loaded onto the computer or server that will host the printer. It is then a case of plugging the printer in and away you go. (Of course there can be a slightly more involved process when setting the printer up on a server, but I won?t go into that here!)
Once set
up the printer deals with print processes quickly, the 4 MB memory on board will make quick work of most standard Word documents such as letters. Larger documents and graphics will take the printer a little longer to process, but the waiting time is not excessive.
The printer will knock out 10 pages per minute which is more than adequate for most offices, although maybe a little slower than the latest HP Laserjet models.
The warm up time for this model is very quick, and it is ready receive prints in less than a 1 minute after being switched on from cold.
Print quality is good, the printer uses Hewlett Packard?s REt print resolution technology to render images that are both precise and sharp on the paper. The 1200 x 1200 dpi resolution should be good enough for most office applications and will produce letters and documents at a quality that will be decent enough for most people.
To get the best quality we have found that using HP?s Ultra Precise range of toner cartridges seems to produce the clearest and sharpest print quality. However, these toners are not cheap, as I have pointed out in some of my toner cartridge reviews on Ciao!
In reliability terms, we have not had any problems with the Laserjet 2100s that we have been using. In three years of hard office use there have not been any major hardware issues with these printers, so I guess that shows that they stand up to punishment pretty well!
Conclusion
These are good quality printers. I would recommend this printer for standard office use as I think it provides a good specification for the money, good performance and is also a very reliable workhorse for most office printing tasks.
Thanks for reading!
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