HP LASERJET P1006 TONER CARTRIDGE

HP LaserJet P1006 Review

Overview:

Unless you’re in college, most people don’t use their printers on a regular basis. Having an inkjet printer at home that hasn’t been used in a couple of months, the ink likely has dried and needs to be replaced. Laser printer toner starts out as dry ink, allowing for a longer shelf life and lower printing costs. If you don’t need color printing, the HP LaserJet P1006 is the ideal solution for the casual printer user. Able to emulate 1,200 dpi resolution at 17 pages per minute, this lightweight USB printer won’t take up a lot of space on your desk.

Pros:

Coming out of the box at only 10 pounds, the rounded LaserJet P1006 has a footprint of only 14” x 9”—with the paper flip-tray closed. When loaded with paper and the dust cover in place, you’ll need to add an additional 4.5 to 7 inches to it’s total depth.

Unlike other laser printers where you may have to wait as long as 30 seconds after the printer wakes-up from sleep mode, the P1006 has one of the fastest warm-up times. After only an 8.5 second delay, this LaserJet will start printing single-sided 8.5” x 11” sheets at 17 pages per minute. With a fixed 8MB of memory, the P1006 will be able to handle most print jobs.

The150-sheet flip-tray supports paperweights from 16# to 28# paper, and sizes ranging from 3” x 5” up to 8.5” x 14” legal size. The P1006’s has a 10-sheet multi-purpose slot for labels, cardstock, envelopes, and transparencies.

With HP’s FastRes 1200, the LaserJet’s native 600 x 600 dpi resolution is enhanced to produce prints of 600 x 2400 dpi quality without compromising performance. This keeps printed text sharp--even at 6-point font sizes--and does a decent job with printing photographs in B&W. Like all LaserJets, the P1006 comes with a Toner Save feature to conserve on ink.

Cons:

While idling below 25 dB, the printer produces 50.6 dB of sound while printing. To give you an idea of what that means: 50 decibels is about the level of low conversations and 30 decibels is the sound of a quiet night in a desert (excluding the Las Vegas strip). While 50 decibels may not be loud, it is if the printer is sitting next to you chugging off 50 pages for that school report.

Holding only 150 pages, if you are using this printer in an office or classroom the smaller paper capacity of the LaserJet P1006 means frequent refilling. However, for the casual home printer this won’t be a problem.

The control panel consists of a single Cancel button. There are just two LEDs for communication, so figuring out the various light patterns will be like having to read Morse code—or POST code from a BIOS. It might be a good idea to print a copy of the error codes and tape it to the side of the printer.