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. In fact, HP claims that the 4100 series is the world's biggest-selling laser printer. With this grand title comes a slight problem: how to supersede the most super of all mono lasers. HP's response is twofold: the new LaserJet 4200 and 4300 series, not only improve on the 4100, but positively blow it out of the water.
The 4100 series already offers a decent output speed of 25ppm. However, for those who require a little more grunt for slightly larger or more demanding offices, HP has introduced the 4300 series. We reviewed the 4300dtn, which features networking, automatic duplexing and a second paper tray. Externally, it looks similar to its predecessor, the 4100n. The most significant change is the new LCD control panel, which provides four lines of settings information instead of the 4100n's two.
However, delve beneath the surface and the 4300dtn is a totally different animal. You want high-performance office printing? How does 45ppm grab you? This is an incredible 80 per cent performance boost over the 4100n and even comes close to matching the A4 performance of HP's LaserJet 9000dn 50ppm departmental laser printer.
The 4300dtn comes with 80MB of memory, so huge print jobs can be processed. Some of this memory may even be used as a RAM drive, allowing for security features such as proof and hold and secure print without needing the optional 10GB hard disk. It's possible to upgrade memory to a maximum of 416MB via the three available DIMM sockets.
The new high-performance print engine makes the 4300dtn suitable for use in medium-sized workgroups. The enhanced duty cycle of up to 200,000 pages a month and paper capacity of 1,100 A4 sheets mean it can cope with the demands of a busy office.
HP has also increased the capacity of its smart toner cartridge to 18,000 pages. It offers other benefits, such as relaying accurate information about its remaining capacity via the built-in Web server, and is designed to provide the same quality output even when almost empty.
Setting up the printer is a simple affair, thanks to the Wizard-driven installation software, which also detects and attempts to configure printers connected to the network. We experienced a slight hitch when the Wizard couldn't successfully install a TCP/IP port, but this was easy to correct manually.
We tested the 4300dtn installed on a small network using TCP/IP. First up was the ubiquitous 50-page plain text test printed at the default 'FastRes 1200' setting. The HP finished the test in just over a minute at a blistering speed of 45ppm. Text quality was good too, although there was a slight feathering around some edges, unlike the 4100n's sharper results.
The 12-page Excel spreadsheet test is often a stumbling block for lasers, with the block-shaded backgrounds and fine-point text proving too much to handle. The 4300dtn also found it tough, managing the larger font sizes well but slightly blurring the finer point text. It's still easily readable and better than most mono lasers we've seen. We've no qualms about speed, though, printing at 44ppm.
There was also noticeable grain in the 24-page DTP test, which includes a variety of photos and graphics. Detail capture was excellent, highlighting subtle lines that the 4100n missed or obscured by over-saturating the image. Gradient fills were also skilfully reproduced, with little banding. Performance was on target again too at 43ppm, although this drops to 23ppm using the highest-resolution 'ProRes 1200' setting. Print quality wasn't significantly better, though.
The dtn model also includes a duplex unit and performance was good, printing a 20-page PDF with high-resolution photos at a speed of 33 faces per minute.
Like the 4100n, the 4300dtn comes with HP's Embedded Virtual Machine (EVM). This provides support for a number of available JetCAPS Java applications such as PDF Direct, which processes PDF files natively, bypassing the print driver and thereby reducing network traffic. There's also a variety of finishing modules such as a stacker/stapler.
The LaserJet 4300dtn redefines the workgroup laser printer category. It offers unparalleled performance, good-quality output and the best features on the market. $4,399 is a lot of money for a mono printer, especially with colour printers coming down in price. But with the 4300dtn, you could easily replace several lower-volume mono lasers or two of HP's LaserJet 4100s.
The 4300 series looks set to continue HP's dominance in the workgroup laser market.
