HP LASERJET 1220 TONER CARTRIDGE

HP LaserJet 1220 Review

Overview:

Touting one of the smallest footprints for an all-in-one, the 2002 HP’s LaserJet 1220 combines color scanning with B & W copying and printing. The higher capacity toner cartridges mean less downtime between toner changes and memory expansion up to 72MB allows for this LaserJet to handle the demands of being shared across a network.

Pros:

The LaserJet 1220 has the same 16.5“ x 19” footprint as the HP 1200 LaserJet. The footprint is kept the same by stacking the copier & scanning elements on top of the printer base.

While other manufacturers have warm-up times that can take as long as 30 seconds, HP resolves this by essentially keeping the fuser on standby. This results in the LaserJet 1220 to begin printing in less than 10 seconds. The 250-sheet cassette tray will support paperweights from 16# paper to 43# cardstock and sizes ranging from 3” x 5” up to 8.5” x 14” legal size. The 1220 also has a 10-sheet priority tray. Any paper, labels, single-feed envelopes, or transparencies placed in the tray the printer will automatically pull paper from that tray without you having to change printer settings.

In printing at 1200dpi resolution, the Laserjet 1220 keeps text sharp--even at 6-point font sizes--and does a decent job with graphics. Like all LaserJets, the 1220 comes with an EconoMode feature to conserve on toner.

The top-loading media tray allows for up to 30 pages to be fed for scanning or copying. The 1220 scans in color and copies in B & W at 600dpi. The HP Director software offers additional feature such as sending scans as an e-mail and optical character recognition (OCR). For Window XP, you need to go HP’s web site and download the patches to supplement the original software. HP does not offer software support for Vista, and Windows 7 owners will have to rely on the scanning and printing drivers that are already in Windows.

The LaserJet 1220 comes out the box with 8MB of memory and an extra DIMM slot to add up to 64MB more. The extra memory is great to have for large graphic print jobs and if you want to have the printer shared over a network for multiple users.

While PC’s with a parallel interface are becoming few and far between, with the increase of USB devices, it’s nice to free up a USB port if your computer still has a parallel port. You get that choice with the LaserJet 1220. The USB also makes it easy to quickly connect a laptop right to the printer.

Understanding the printing needs of today’s businesses in providing support for the major software applications, HP has installed a full set for print emulators that should satisfy the most diverse office. Emulators include PostScript2, HP PCL5e, and PCL6.

Cons:

While 15 ppm printing and 12 ppm scanning were quite fast in 2002, compared to today’s all-in-ones the LaserJet 1220 is a little long in the tooth.

There comes a time when function should take precedence over fashion. While the LaserJet 1220’s control panel is quite unobtrusive and simple, interpreting the controls is not. In addition to the Scan and Copy buttons located at the top of the document feeder, the 1220 has towards the front a small “Go” button, with two other lights for “Ready” and “Attention”. The Go button can do several things depending on the sequence and duration the button is pressed. All three lights are used in Morse Code fashion to communicate 7 different messages or errors. While it might not have been stylish, I would have opted for an LCD display on the printer.

60 decibels is the level of talking in a room. Now imagine that sound level in your office in the form of a printer. While practically silent in Standby, the LaserJet 1220 produces 60dB during power, wakeup, and printing.