HP LaserJet Pro M1212nf

The black & white LaserJet Pro M1212nf is a compact 4-in1 designed for individuals or professionals in small companies. It promises to cover all the bases, be economical and be easy to share.

Hardware

The angular design is certainly no model of elegance but it is compact. It can print, scan, copy and fax. Its charger can take up to 150 sheets and ethernet connectivity allows you to share it in a network. We're only giving it two stars in this section however as there's no wi-fi, no double-sided and no card reader.




Mac OS, Linux and Windows compatible, HP are announcing it at a rapid 18 ppm.

Speeds: fast

HP have held to their word here. Rapid from standby or off position (see inset), this multifunction also gives good continuous speeds: with our test documents it manages a pretty good sixteen pages per minute (ppm).




Quality: excellent for office documents

There are two print quality settings: 600 or 1200 dpi. As always, we went for the default setting, namely 600 dpi here. This gives excellent quality for office documents. The letters are very clean and visible and, which is rare, you can make out the shading on the graph well. While print head lines are slightly visible on the image below, you won't see them when you've got a document in your hand, even when you hold it up close.


Out of curiosity we compared the 600 dpi prints with the 1200 dpi. The results are already so good at 600 dpi that you would think it would be hard to do better. However, although the difference is only slight, the 1200 dpi document is better rendered. Printing at 1200 dpi takes longer but the results are finer and better defined. Shading is even more accurate and letters more precise (look at the 'd' in 'Speed' for example). A 1200 dpi print takes a couple of seconds longer than the 600 dpi

Part of the graph at 600 dpi	Part of the graph at 1200 dpi

Scanner and copier

The scanner isn't functional. The scan starts by default as soon as you import a document into Photoshop and the resize tool doesn't offer sufficient precision. It's not easy to select the part of the image you want to scan as the zone selection tool isn't very flexible. The dotted line marking out the area to be scanned (see below) can't be drawn manually around the area you want to select.



Preview takes up to 26 seconds and scanning a document takes 12 seconds, whether at 75 or 300 dpi. This is no big gun then and quality is only just okay. Colours are a bit pale and you lose a bit of detail. The contours around the child's face look a slightly blurred.


Energy consumption & Noise levels

Standby energy consumption was a nice surprise: 1.5 W for a laser is really very good. When printing, this goes up to 320 W but, once again, this is quite low for a laser. Not only does this machine not draw too much energy, nor does it make much noise (52 dB (A)).