HP has a huge range of laser printers, stretching from enormous 50ppm A3 corporate behemoths with full finishing capabilities to diminutive 10ppm personal lasers. Of all the printers in its considerable arsenal, its biggest seller by far is the LaserJet 4100 series...

A nice small footprint, which is an advantage in small office spaces, is the order of the day with HP’s offering to the mono marketplace. The LaserJet 1300 produced high quality text, with above average readability even on a grey background and at small point sizes. The embedded image on the test page was slightly over exposed, but still had good definition and solid well-formed black text, helping it to score highest overall in neutral text readability. Our monochrome test page turned up some minor blemishing and driver banding, but a reasonably smooth gradient helped the printer finish in first place overall here too.

Yet another solid HP laser, but it’s beaten by ?rivals in virtually every key area.

One of the largest form factor printers in our roundup, HP’s Colour LaserJet 1500L has a giant footprint. Although not unattractive, with a purple ramp-like front cover, be prepared to sacrifice a reasonably sized piece of office real estate for this printer.

Top colour speeds are only achievable in draft mode, but output quality is quite remarkable

Beautiful double-sided prints, but it takes its time

Slick print quality and faultless speed, but lacking on the features front

The 2300 series, HP's new laser offering for the small to medium-sized workgroup, includes a myriad of significant improvements over the previous 2200 series.

Superb quality, packed with features and cheap to run. A worthy alternative to the Kyocera.

There isn't much point, after all, in owning a network printer capable of printing thousands of pages per month at a ridiculously low price per page if the people that use it don't print out that much on a day-to-day basis.

It isn’t cheap, but plenty of features and top quality propel this printer to the top of the pile

A workgroup printing workhorse that delivers classy mono and colour print quality

A workgroup printing workhorse that delivers classy mono and colour print quality.

The first thing we noticed about this printer was its strange physical resemblance to the Labs Winner, and significantly more expensive, HP LaserJet 1300. There are plenty of technical specs to differentiate the two, including RAM, print resolution and OS support, all swinging in HP’s favour though.

Impressive print quality, a good turn of speed and decent features, but it simply costs too much to own.

An uncompromising monochrome laser that gets the job done with speed and precision.

Well-equipped and quite quick, but the quality is patchy

While it produced well-defined and solid text all the way down to small font sizes, the E321 did feature a few minor print quality shortcomings; these included heavy toner saturation, making the images dark and murky while poor dithering on gradients made the images appear banded and blotchy.

The LBP-2410’s real strength clearly lay in its speed, as opposed to its print quality. It was the third fastest printer overall, but fell in the shadow of the Labs Winner OKI C5100 for printing times and TCO over both low and high monthly duty cycles.

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