New Low Cost Laserjet Printer from HP March 11, 2008 10:05 by John Sollars

HP Laserjet P1505 Review

Pitched by HP at the entrylevel end of the laser market the HP Laserjet P1505 is available online for under £100 at the time of writing (March 2008). This printer along with all of its rivals is made to a price and gives you no fancy control functions or LCD displays, instead reverts to buttons and LED's. It more than makes up for this in the print speed department, with our tests giving an average of 22PPM in both normal and draft modes priting a mix of text and graphics.

The P1505 does lack in the connectivity stakes, with the only option being a USB 2.0 (High Speed) connection to a standalone PC, but there is a Networked option available the P1505N, but that adds nearly £60 to the price – which is a bit much.

As to print quality and costs. The P1505 uses the new Toner cartridge CB436A (36A) giving a page yield of 2,000 pages per cartridge and therefore a cost per page of £0.0225. Because it is a new cartridge there are no refilled or compatible cartridges around at the moment. Utilising HP's spherical toner technology the printer produced clear dark text with no spidering, but graphics were a bit of a disapointment. On gradients we could see banding and the maximum resolution was only 600 x 600 dpi.

So, what do you get for your money?. A small neat standalone device, which is quiet and quick. First page out is 6.5 seconds from sleep mode which is very acceptable. A standard 250 Sheet input tray and 150 sheet output tray and offering the ability to print onto a range of media up to 163 GSM. If you are looking for a low cost mono home/small office desk printer then this could be the one for you.