The user experience, however, is frustrating, and the overall performance disappointing. On paper and in the flesh, the HP Color Laser 150nw looks like a smart, conveniently compact and refreshingly simple print-only device at a price that’s too good to be true. Image credit: TechRadar (Image credit: Jim Hill) Final verdict You may find that the money you saved in buying a cheap printer is soon wiped out by the amount of media wasted in paper jams, printing out error pages, and printing on a single side. Of more concern is the printer’s intolerance to anything but smooth A4 laser paper. Yes, consecutive pages trot out at a reasonable pace in black and white when all goes well, but the first page out time is way too slow. Overall, the print quality here is acceptable for many tasks, but it’s below average and the print speed is frustrating. We were driven to masking the LED with parcel tape. Beside the red exclamation point is the backlit power button which also flashes continuously in standby mode until you power it right down. However, we found that the ‘error information’ was never helpful and only wasted yet more paper. You can print out a page that will tell you the printer’s network status and an error report. It’s incredibly irritating, but you’ll have to get used to it because in addition to the paper jams, the printer frequently fails to recognize when paper is loaded in the tray. In lieu of a display panel, this printer informs you of paper feed problems by flashing a red LED exclamation mark. Needless to say, it won’t print on envelopes of any size. The specifications suggest that heavy paper and recycled paper should be fine, but we would advise sticking with smooth laser paper of medium weight to avoid jams. In short, we’d have to say that this is not a fast laser printer.ĭuring testing we experienced more than one paper jam with up to five sheets of plain A4 paper becoming stuck in the system. Color pages are quoted at 4ppm which is more realistic. Consecutive sheets do churn out more quickly and HP quotes a print rate of 18 ppm for mono pages, but we found that figure to be optimistic. We waited for 1 minute 6 seconds for a color document to emerge and 45 seconds for a page of text. The first page out time is very slow and if you’re not patient, you will find yourself printing duplicate pages by mistake. Having no display of any kind also adds an element of guesswork, making you wonder if the printer is actually working or not. Image credit: TechRadar (Image credit: Jim Hill) However, assuming all goes according to the very brief instructions in the manual, the setup procedure should be quite quick. This should be straightforward, although for some reason our sample refused to accept the network, or any Wi-Fi Direct password. With no display, you’ll need to use your smartphone and the companion app called HP Smart to get your new printer to join your Wi-Fi network. That’s significantly more than the cost of the printer itself, and it makes the cost per page higher than most laser printers at around 3.5p for mono pages and 19.6p for color documents. A replacement set of toner of the same capacity will cost around £186 (about US$233, AU$333). There is a manual duplex mode, but even if you can figure out how to enable this, it still means you have to stand beside the printer and turn the paper over by hand.įour toner cartridges come pre-loaded giving you enough black, magenta, yellow and cyan to print 1,000 mono pages and 700 color. The absence of an auto-duplex mode is a more serious omission because printing only on one side of the page will impact your paper budget, as well as the environment. Instead, you can press and hold the Resume key for 10 seconds to print out a page revealing the printer’s status and any errors it is experiencing. There’s no NFC connectivity and no display of any kind. There is only one paper-in tray, which can hold 150 sheets, and while the paper-out tray is on top of the printer and looks like it could hold a similar amount, it can actually only hold 50 sheets before it becomes congested, as we’ve already mentioned. Sadly, there’s no front USB port for flash memory drives. There’s also an Ethernet port at the rear and a USB Type-B port beside it. Wi-Fi is built-in with Wi-Fi Direct available for connecting your smartphone without joining a network. This stripped-down print-only device comes with only the most essential features. Here are the full specs of the HP Color Laser 150nw:Ĭonsumables included: Toner for 1,000 pages mono or 700 colorĭimensions/Weight: 82 x 398 x 274mm (H x W x D) 10kg Features and specifications
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