Written by Matthew JC Powell
September 21, 2010
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Printers are not glamorous. Printers are commodities. When comparing one printer against another (particularly in the realm of the monochrome laser) fancy tech specs are a secondary consideration. What you want to know is: Does it work reliably, is it affordable, and will it stay out of my way. Hewlett-Packard's LaserJet P1102w works reliably, is very affordable for what it is, and it will stay out of your way so you can get on with what you're doing rather than fussing about printing.
I'll address the last question first. The "w" in this printer's name stands, as you might have guessed, for "wireless" and the printer supports all the popular flavours of 802.11 wireless networking. This is important when space is at a premium, because it means you don't have to find a spot near the host computer and you don't need to figure out how to stop people tripping over cables. Pop it on a shelf somewhere convenient, and away you go.
It's also very compact at 194mmx330mmx347mm. That 330mm dimension is the maximum, fully-extended depth of the printer. it should be noted that even with all the flaps and doors open it fits very comfortably on a 30cm deep shelf from IKEA. In other words, this printer is not going to be a major space consideration — something that cannot be said for some mono lasers.
Affordability is one of those "piece of string" questions, and much depends on your own requirements. HP claims 16,000 pages from each $95 toner cartridge at 5% coverage. It also recommends a duty cycle of around 1000 sheets of paper — while it's rated for up to 5000 sheets per month HP says such heavy usage will shorten the life of the product. Bear that in mind when weighing up how much printing you need to do.
The purchase price, at $189 (you can get a USB model without the w for $149) is about right for a 600x600 monochrome laser promising 18 pages per minute. it's not the cheapest on the market but it is robust.
Which brings me to the final consideration: reliability. I have been burned too many times by wireless printers that turned out to be utterly flaky in real-life use — Lexmark, I'm looking at you. I've become very wary when reviewing such beasts.
The LaserJet P1102w did not disappoint me. Indeed, it rather impressed me. I let it go into its power-saving "deep sleep" mode and it woke quickly every time I sent a job to it. I switched it off and left it off, then it found the network again when turned back on. I even restarted the AirPort base station a few times to confuse the DHCP leases, and the HP found its way back. You wonder what you're paying for when you buy a big-brand printer, that's it right there.
HP claims up to 18ppm in terms of printing speed, and if you're going to be testing that claim perhaps your requirements are above this unit's 1000-pages-per-month recommended duty cycle. I sent multiple documents from single pages up to eight pages to the P1102w and not once did I find it hadn't started printing in the time it took me to walk to the printer. Indeed for anything up to four pages it was usually finished by the time I got there. In practical, real-world terms, it's plenty fast.
If I have one criticism it's not so much with the printer as with the documentation. Installation of the printer on a Windows box appears to be very straightforward though I obviously didn't test that. The instructions given for installing it on a Mac are bewilderingly complex — unnecessarily so — and involved printing out pages of arcane network data during the process. If I were a less knowledgeable Mac user I would look at those instructions and immediately call someone professional to help me, or maybe give up completely.
The irony is, it's actually extremely simple and quick to do. Whoever wrote HP's instructions was clearly not aware of Bonjour (previously known as Rendezvous), Apple's zero-configuration networking technology. This printer supports it, and that makes it a jot to set up. For one thing, you do not, contrary to HP's instructions, need to have your computer connected to the printer with a USB cable — if you had space to do that why did you get a wireless printer?
My own — simpler — instructions are to be found on MacTheBlog.
