HP LaserJet Pro MFP M521dn

BY M. DAVID STONE

The HP LaserJet Pro MFP M521dn ($899.99 direct) is a quietly impressive beast. Designed as a mono laser workhorse, with a 75,000 page per month maximum duty cycle and a 6,000 page per month recommended maximum, it can print and fax from, as well as scan to, a computer, including over a network, and it can work as a standalone copier, fax machine, and direct email sender. More important, it does well enough at everything it does to make it Editors’ Choice for medium to heavy-duty use in a small to mid-size office or workgroup.

There’s nothing flashy here, like super-fast speed. In fact, it’s easy to find printers, like the Editors’ Choice Brother MFC-8950DW$588.96 at pcRUSH.com or the far less expensive Canon imageClass MF4770n$129.99 at OfficeMax that are faster. On the other hand, the M521dn offers a combination of features that make it more usable than most MFPs.

MFP Features and Basics
In addition to the basic MFP features I’ve already mentioned—printing, scanning, copying, faxing, and email—the M521dn can both scan to and print from a USB memory key. In an unusual touch for a monochrome printer, it will even let you preview the photos stored on the memory key before printing them. It also supports printing though the cloud.

Much higher on its list of key features is its scan capability. Like most MFPs aimed at office use, the M521dn supplements a flatbed scanner with an automatic document feeder (ADF). As is common, the flatbed is limited to letter-size paper while the 50-page ADF lets you scan up to legal size. Unlike most of the competition, however, including some significantly more expensive MFPs like the Editors’ Choice Dell B3465dnf Multifunction Laser Printer$1,399.99 at Dell, the M521dn offers a duplex scanner for copying and scanning. (It won’t scan in duplex for faxing, however, which takes a little of the shine off the feature.)

Having a duplex scanner (meaning that it can scan both sides of a page at the same time) is different from having a duplexing ADF, which scans one side, turns the page over, and then scans the other. Either approach will let you scan duplex documents. And if the MFP also offers duplex printing plus appropriate copying commands, as with the M521dn, either approach will also let you copy single- or double-sided originals to your choice of single- or double-sided copies. However, scanning in duplex is a lot faster than scanning with a duplexing ADF.

We don’t usually time duplex scanning with MFPs, because most desktop MFPs that duplex use duplexing ADFs, which is more of a convenience feature than something that’s truly competitive with duplexing scanners. With the M521dn, however, I ran a test using a 25-sheet document just to get a sense of its speed. For scanning to disk, and including the time for saving the file to disk after scanning, the M521dn came in at 10.7 pages per minute (ppm) or 21.4 images per minute (ipm), with one image on each side of the page. If you scan duplex documents very often, this one feature can save a lot of time compared with using an MFP with a duplexing ADF.

Very much on the plus side for the M521dn is the 3.5-inch touch screen, with its particularly well-designed menu system. The combination makes it easy to both change settings in the printer and give commands for copying, faxing, and emailing.

One other strong point is the paper handing for printing, with both a 500-sheet paper drawer and 100-sheet multipurpose tray standard, along with the automatic duplexer. The 600-sheet capacity should be enough for most small to mid-size offices. If you need more, however, you can add a second 500-sheet drawer ($185 street), for a total of 1,100 sheets.

Setup and Speed
At 20.0 by 18.3 by 18.3 inches (HWD), the M521dn is too imposing to share a desk with. It’s also heavy enough, at 52.7 pounds, that you’ll probably want some help moving it. Once in place, however, setup is standard fare. For my tests I connected it to a wired network and installed the driver on a system running Windows Vista.

As I’ve already suggested, speed is not a strong point. HP rates the engine at 42 ppm, and I timed it as being a touch faster, at 43 ppm, for printing a text document with little to no formatting from Microsoft Word. On our business applications suite, however (timed with QualityLogic’s hardware and software), it came in at a surprisingly slow 5.3 ppm. Although that’s a tolerable speed, it’s significantly slower than most other mono laser printers we’ve tested. The Brother MFC-8950DW, for example, managed 10.6 ppm, the Canon imageClass MF4770n came in at 12.3 ppm, and the Dell B3465dnf hit 15.0 ppm

Output Quality and Other Issues
Output quality is a mixed bag. The good news is that the M521dn handled text in our tests particularly well, which is generally the most important kind of output for a mono printer. Text quality was well above par, making it easily good enough for any business use and even good enough for most desktop publishing applications.

Graphics output was a touch below par, but still within the tight range where the vast majority of mono laser MFPs fall. That makes it good enough for any internal business need. Depending on how critical an eye you have, you may or may not consider it acceptable for, say, PowerPoint handouts. Photo quality was also at the low end of par for a mono laser MFP. It was certainly good enough to print recognizable photos from Web pages. Whether you consider it suitable for anything more than that will depend, once again, on how critical an eye you have.

The one feature I wish this printer had that it doesn’t is the ability to fax in duplex. However, if you don’t need to fax duplex documents, that won’t be an issue. It also doesn’t leave you any worse off for faxing than with an MFP that can’t handle duplexing at all, making this oversight more of a missed opportunity than an actual problem.

Faster print speed would be welcome also. However, the time saved with duplex scanning and copying if you need it can more than make up for whatever points the printer loses on print speed. The text quality is a big plus too, as part of a highly attractive balance of speed, output quality, paper handling, and MFP features. For a small to mid-size office that needs to copy or scan (but not fax) duplex documents on a regular basis, all this can make the HP LaserJet Pro MFP M521dn a near-perfect fit, which is also enough to make it an Editors’ Choice.

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HP LaserJet Pro 400 MFP

By Edward J. Correia

Well-built software and the intuitive interface of its touch-sensitive control panel is icing on the cake for Hewlet-Packard’s LaserJet Pro 400 MFP M425dn, a monochromatic multifunction printer for the small-to-medium sized office or department. For $499 list, the unit delivers a capable, two-sided PCL/PostScript laser printer with high-resolution black-and-white copier, color scanner and fax that’s easy to install, set up and use locally or over a network.

An imposing figure, HP’s 400-series MFP stands 17 inches tall, but needs almost 10 inches more than that for accessing its scanner and copier bed. Its squarish footprint occupies about 14 by 16 inches, and all everyday functions are accessible from the front. These include access to its 250-sheet paper cassette (with low-paper indicator gauge) and toner service, which takes place through a large tilt-down door that also helps facilitate the clearing of paper jams.

Also in front is a USB 2.0 port for walk-up printing of JPG and PDF formats and for saving scanned images to JPG, PDF, RTF, TXT, BMP, PNG and TIFF formats. Scanned images also can be shipped off to a server, email recipient or the cloud. The scanner’s hardware maxes out at 1,200-x-1,200 dpi when using the flatbed, and can handle up to 8.5-by-11.7-inch originals. Maximum resolution when using the auto-document feeder is 300-x-300 dpi, and it’s rated at 20 pages per minute for letter-sized, black-and-white and 9 ppm for color.

HP LaserJet 400 Pro MFP M425dn

Though the M425dn has a rated duty cycle of 50,000 pages a month, HP recommends a page volume between 750 and 3,000 pages, placing it squarely in the small-office category. The black-and-white-only copier supports 600-x-600 dpi and is rated to crank out copies as quickly as the printer can print — that’s at 35 ppm. Like most copiers, originals are placed in the top-loading (50-sheet) feeder, which wakes the M425dn from power-save mode. Two button presses and 10 seconds later, a perfect duplicate (rotated 90 degrees) is dumped into the 150-sheet output bin. A multipurpose tray can hold 50 sheets or 10 envelopes, bringing the unit’s standard capacity to 300 sheets; a 500-sheet third tray is a $125 option.

When you’ve been at the printer game for as long as HP (NYSE:HPQ), good software usually goes with the territory. And that’s clearly the case here; the M425dn was among the fastest and easiest we’ve seen to set up and configure. Much of the credit goes to well-developed and bullet-proof software tools, including its driver and utility installer for Mac OS X and Windows, and its remote management software.

Along with the printer, power cable and telephone cord came a multilingual, illustrated quick installation guide (which we didn’t need) and installation disks for Mac OS X and Windows. On the Mac side, we were impressed with the level of integration between the install utility and the operating system. For example, once drivers were installed, the installer optionally launches the Print & Fax preferences tool, displays step-by-step instructions on how to add and configure the new printer for use by the host Mac and offers to place a copy of the utility in the Dock. During setup, the printer acquired an IP address over its gigabit Ethernet automatically and was identified by the software right away. Total setup time (not including file copying) was about five minutes. The experience on Windows was similar, if perhaps less polished. There’s no Linux driver.

Going well beyond consumables monitoring, HP delivers an excellent utility for Mac OS X and Windows that gives IT or service resellers control from anywhere on the network over nearly every settable feature and function of the M425dn, including networking, power-save settings, scanning and faxing, tray configuration, duplex mode, font and file upload, diagnostic and, of course, supplies management. On the Mac (shown), the tool is modeled after Apple’s System Preferences control panel and even pops up printer messages on a designated Mac.

As for print speed, the HP LaserJet Pro 400 MFP M425dn printed exactly according to HP claims. For testing, we sent a 35-page black-text document to the printer. The first page appeared in 12 seconds, and all 35 pages were in the tray after 1:10 minutes. We repeated the test with a document containing color graphics with the same result. Next we ordered the copier to run 35 copies of one of the test pages, again with the same result.

To vary that old phrase, no one gets fired for buying Hewlett-Packard printers. And with its solid construction, versatile functionality and utilities, and mobile printing through HP’s ePrint for Android and iOS, or Apple (NSDQ:AAPL)’s AirPrint, the HP LaserJet Pro 400 MFP M425dn would be among the safest $500 investments by any small business.

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HP Unveils New Printing Innovations that Digitize the Office, Help Reduce Costs

PALO ALTO, Calif., Oct. 30, 2012

 

HP today announced new HP Officejet Pro and HP LaserJet printers and content management solutions designed to redefine business and government printing by enabling customers to reduce costs, increase efficiency and digitize the office.

The new offerings represent the largest upgrade to HP’s commercial printers in almost a decade, signifying the integration of intellectual property (IP) and innovation from across the organization.

“Our customers need innovative technology tailored to their workflow that is simple and effective, and helps them conduct business,” said Todd Bradley, executive vice president, HP Printing and Personal Systems. “HP is offering new ways to print that have not previously been possible—with superb speed and performance to drive a new level of office efficiency.”

HP Officejet Pro: Outstanding speed, quality, reliability and cost efficiency for SMBs

HP Officejet Pro X Series desktop printers and multifunction printers (MFP) deliver up to twice the speed at up to half the printing cost compared with color laser printers in their class.(1, 2) This new class of devices is powered by HP PageWide Technology, the next-generation inkjet platform that sets a new standard for small work team printing. It offers small and medium-sized businesses (SMBs), remote offices and branch offices high-quality documents at up to 70 pages per minute.(3)

HP LaserJet and cloud-based solutions digitize the office, simplify data access

The creation of vast amounts of business and government data means customers need a way to streamline how information is managed and accessed. The HP LaserJet Enterprise flow MFP M525cand HP LaserJet Enterprise color flow MFP M575c offer higher-performance document processing and sharing. This provides an ideal on-ramp to the digitized world with premium scanning and data entry that speed the transition from a paper to digital office.

The HP flow MFPs can be integrated with content management solutions based on software fromAutonomy, an HP Company, either on-site or via the cloud. By pairing HP printing technology with Autonomy solutions, customers can access, organize and leverage information in documents, audio, video, email and web pages.

The HP Flow CM Professional brings enterprise-class content management to growing businesses, with security features that also support leading banks, legal firms and stock exchanges. The cloud-based offering increases collaboration and productivity by easily capturing, indexing, storing, searching and retrieving documents through a unique user-friendly interface designed with the customer in mind.

The HP Flow CM Enterprise is composed of a set of enterprise content management (ECM) offerings for large organizations that give instant access to vital information and help to integrate, simplify and automate processes to help reduce operating costs, improve employee productivity and assist with compliance efforts.

“The HP Flow CM Professional and HP flow MFPs offer us an opportunity to improve employee productivity via collaboration and streamlined processes, allowing us to focus more time toward our customers and overall business,” said Stephen Cassar, chief executive officer, TICKETsage. “We see these offerings as having a very positive impact on our business—making it easy to scan documents, easy to find them in the cloud-based document management system and easy to print out information.”

Office printing to increase productivity

Organizations of all sizes can address the need to increase productivity while reducing the complexity of their printing environment.

For SMBs looking to increase office efficiencies with fast, powerful prints, HP is offering two additional series of HP LaserJet Pro printers. HP also is introducing new and enhanced document workflow solutions along with HP LaserJet Enterprise series printers that simplify productivity in enterprise organizations. For workers on the go, HP now offers greater access to print from cloud-based applications, incorporating Google Apps mailbox support through its HP ePrint Enterprise.(4)

For improving workflow through targeted customer communications across print and electronic channels, HP is offering HP Exstream LiveSite Connector and HP Claims Correspondence 2.0. HP Exstream LiveSite Connector combines solutions from Autonomy and HP Exstream to offer consistent, analytics-based, targeted customer communications. HP Claims Correspondence 2.0 reduces claims-settlement cycle time, provides faster correspondence processing and improves online awareness of claims status by uniting document content with people and processes.

Additional information about today’s announcements is available at www.hp.com/go/FallBizPrinting.