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.
Like the HP 1300, pulling the small plastic flap mounted on the front of the chassis opens the unit and draws the toner forward, making for extremely simple toner roll replacement without the need for complicated installation procedures.
This system also allows for easy diagnosis and removal of paper jams, granting full control of the machine’s operation to even inexperienced laser printer users.
The front-loaded paper tray is a caddy which will hold up to a whopping 250 sheets of 163gsm paper. While only capable of holding half this in the output tray, these figures are also identical to the HP 1300. By leaving a small gap in the rear of the paper tray, more paper can be inserted without the need for the entire cartridge to be removed and refilled -- great for those on-the-fly paper refill moments when you realise you’ll be short a few pages, while printed sheets are ejected and stored in a top-located output tray.
The LBP-1210 also features both USB and parallel connectivity, allowing for connection to older machines. Supportive only of Microsoft Windows 95 upward, it features no native Mac OS support despite having USB connectivity. It is also supplied with an intuitive and easy to use Canon graphical user interface making it ideal for all levels of knowledge. With a ten second average print time; this printer is compact, speedy and has reasonable TCO costs for low volume printing, although higher volume printing may set you back a little more.