Friday 6 June 2008

HP Laserjet P1505 Review


Undercutting all of the small laser printers recently tested, the HP Laserjet P1505, with a price tag under £90 is aimed at the budget end of the laser market. Lacking an LCD screen, it makes do with buttons and coded lights and although it boasts a USB2.0 port, there is no Ethernet port for multi-user printing. If network printing is a high priority, HP does offer the P1505n model that incorporates an Ethernet port, but the price rises by an unreasonable £50.
Design
The P1505 will certainly not take up too much room on your desktop. At 8.9x14.9x9.6 inches, it is smaller than many inkjet printers and weighing only 12.9 pounds it is not difficult to move single-handed. Without an LCD screen, the control panel consists of an array of lights labelled with icons that are so confusing, you often have to refer to the on screen documentation to figure out what the light sequence is telling you. HP has obviously cut corners to get down to this price and the paper guides that are located deep within the input tray are small and hard to move. The output tray also has a rather flimsy fold out extension showing more cost paring.
Cartridges
Do not be overly concerned if you are quickly required to renew the toner cartridge on this machine. It is factory fitted with a small capacity starter cartridge that is limited to 1,000 pages. The only available replacement cartridge (HP CB436a) is good for double this amount, although at £42 is not very good value, giving a cost per page of over 2p. The other problem with this cartridge is the fact that it is a new design and is currently only used in a total of three models. Unless it is introduced into more new printers, it is unlikely that cheaper compatible toner cartridges will be commonly available in the near future, leaving you with high print costs.
Performance
Unfortunately there was also evidence of cost cutting in the print tests. Plain text is handled fairly well given the likely workload, HP’s new spherical toner delivering crisp characters, however graphic performance isn’t up to par. Gradients were afflicted by plenty of banding and the maximum resolution of 600x600 dpi is half of that available from some other budget printers, like the Brother HL-5240. If print quality is disappointing, the same cannot be said for print speed. This printer hit 22ppm in tests that included both text and graphics, a result that is excellent for a budget laser printer and is faster than many more expensive printers.

If you are just after a fast affordable mono laser printer for your home office, at less than £90 the HP Laserjet P1505 may just fit the bill. But if you require a little more in the way of usable features or better quality output, you would be well advised to increase the budget slightly and look one division up, at the likes of the Brother HL-5240.

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