HP Color LaserJet CP1215 Printer Review Best suited for small offices

HP Color LaserJet CP1215 is Hewlett Packard’s entry level printer built to serve small work groups; however its main drawback is its frustratingly slow print speed and a missing LCD. Tagged at $299 you can check out Dell 1320c another color laser with faster print speed for the same price. It is also a perfect choice if you happen to be on a Mac, or typically print a large volume of color documents.

The look of HP CP 1215 laserjet printer is very simple with gray and white shades that cover the model. It includes the basic control panel on the side of the faceplate that contains all the buttons necessary to operate or whenever there is any trouble shooting like a Ready light, Resume button, Cancel button, Paper Jam light, Attention light, and a series of icons that glow to indicate low toner levels all make up the majority of the control panel, with Paper Feed and Power buttons rounding out the set. The indicator lights worked well but a simple two-line LCD that could display specific troubleshooting help or detailed information about a print job would be preferable.

The printer measures 15.7 inches wide by 10 inches tall by approximately 20 inches deep and weighs around 38.9 pounds which means it is lighter than other models. This model does not have features like internal auto duplexing and networking hardware which makes it lighter.

The printer is designed very simply with a small Power button on the left side and a power plug on the lower back. All the paper handling and toner access takes place up front by way of several fold-out drawers. You can see the output tray, toner drawer, and input tray at the very bottom, which can only hold up to 150 sheets of plain paper placed in a vertical manner. There is a greater demand for larger capacity trays that can hold at least 250 pages and does not require constant re filling.

The HP color laserjet CP 1215 is a USB only printer and hence installing the drive and establishing a connection with the computer is not a hassle. Direct connection is necessary and you do not have any option to buy a networking attachment for the printer. The basic installation procedure is very simple and you do not need to wrestle with the printer for a few minutes before getting it to work. You are given only a few options to change the settings.  The printer is fixed at a 600X600dpi resolution for both black and color. The manual color options let you choose between four color or black neutral grays to save ink, but there’s no way to adjust the resolution of your prints.

This model is designed to hold four toner cartridges cyan, magenta, yellow, and black unlike some other printers which have more than 4 cartridges. We concluded that pages of text were a little on the light side and the overall quality was slightly inconsistent. The characters that were printed were cleaner and better defined than any other printer. However it is suggested that if you are only going to use the printer for text you can check out other options.

Graphics were not very clear either. In contrast to the text, the color was a little too dark on the default settings. After a few minutes of tweaking we could print some extremely vibrant and exciting images. The prints were a touch on the darker side. It is recommended that you check the print action before buying if you like the prints to be bright rather than brooding.

HP is well known for the comprehensive one year warranty that it offers which includes the 24×7 toll free telephone support and live web chat on their website during their weekdays. Their websites also contains downloadable drivers, software, and manuals, e-mail tech support, FAQs, and a troubleshooting guide to assist their user.

Overall it can be concluded that the Color LaserJet CP1215 is HP’s entry-level printer built to serve small workgroups, but it suffers from frustratingly slow print speeds, and missing LCD screen. Color prints ran at less than two pages per minute, and text came out at the relatively sluggish rate of 8.7 pages per minutes. At $ 299 you can go much further with the Dell 1320c, another color laser with faster print speeds for the same price.

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