Art-ology

The HP LaserJet 1200 printer and its capabilities seem to point to the fact that Hewlett-Packard has intended this monochrome laser printer using HP LaserJet 1200 toner to be ready for relatively high-speed printing jobs in a small office or home office environment. It provides good print speed, is compatible with Mac computers (which many HP printers aren’t) and even has a scanner attachment as optional equipment.

Truthfully, it’s clear that Hewlett-Packard intends for the 1200 to fill a role more suitable for a personal printer rather than the main printer in a large workgroup. It comes at a very nice price, and this price seems even more attractive after learning that this laser printer can put out 15 pages of copy in a minute. It might not be the fastest, but it’s also not the slowest printer and for those on a limited budget, the 1200 certainly offers a lot.

Print quality is excellent, especially given the low price. Hewlett-Packard works hard with the 1200 to come up with a good compromise between quality of print and low cost, and it largely succeeds with this particular model. It delivers 1200 dots per inch of print resolution capability, which is something not usually seen in a printer segment that normally features printers offering only 600 dots per inch.

When it comes to memory, or RAM, this HP printer features a standard 8 MB that can be upgraded to 64 MB with little trouble. For a small office or home office, this should be more than enough to meet most any need. Start with 8 MB and assess whether or not the need to upgrade further will be needed, either now or in the future. It will all be controlled by a 90 MHz microprocessor, which is also okay.

In terms of how versatile this printer is, this point shows through whenever it comes time to connect the printer to a computer. It features both parallel port and USB connectivity, which printers running for around $95 normally can’t do. Most printers at this level come with one or the other, but never both. In fact, most come with just serial or parallel port capability.

The printer is also fairly durable, with a solid 10,000 pages per month of maximum duty cycle on hand. This means the printer is rated to be able to image up to 10,000 sheets per month before requiring regular maintenance. Hewlett-Packard says it recommends between 3,000 and 5,000 pages as standard when it comes to operations capabilities, although it doesn’t say that one can’t go with the higher number.

This HP model can also handle a variety of different media stock, including transparencies, cards, labels and plain paper of many different sizes. It has an auto load paper tray capable of holding up to 250 sheets of paper and a custom manual load slot that can take up to 10 sheets of paper, if needed. This is a desktop model, so 250 sheets is excellent, quite frankly.

As far as price, the HP LaserJet 1200 printer will really impress. At present, it can be found for between $95 and $120 on a number of different websites. There are also handy printer drivers and owners manuals available at Hewlett-Packard’s own website. Considering that the 1200 delivers decent print speed, good durability and excellent print quality, there’s really nothing to complain about with this particular HP printer.

Everyone wants savings on printer consumables, such as the HP LaserJet 1200 replacement toner, and this is where ordering HP replacement toners online can help.  Reputable vendors via the Internet offer great prices on printer toners.