Product Reviews

These days, you can buy a basic laser printer for as little as £50 and some of the cheapest models are surprisingly good as we discovered in our December 2006 group test. You may need to pay a little more to get the features you want, though. HP's LaserJet P2015 is a smart-looking printer, with a fast 26 pages per minute (ppm) speed rating. Unlike some cheaper lasers, it has a fully-enclosed 250-sheet paper cassette and a separate multipurpose paper feed slot.

The P2015 supports the Printer Control Language (PCL) and PostScript print languages. These help to simplify printing by reducing the amount of information that the computer needs to calculate and send to a printer. For example, instead of telling the printer exactly where to put toner on the page to draw each character correctly, the computer

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only needs to tell it which letter to draw the printer already knows what each character should actually look like.

Printers that support PCL and PostScript normally have more memory and a powerful processor to cope with the extra workload, but they can be slower than a printer that lets Windows do the hard work. The P2015 was extremely quick to print our two 50-page text documents, but disappointingly slow when it came to printing graphics. It couldn't finish our high-resolution 10 x 8in photos at its maximum resolution setting, which is normally a sign that there isn't enough onboard memory. You can, however, upgrade the standard 32MB to a maximum of 288MB.

As you'd expect from a laser, the P2015 prints excellent black text. Its graphic and photo prints weren't too bad either, showing none of the horizontal bands that often plague mono laser prints. We found that grey text had smoother outlines when we used the PCL driver too.

The HP LaserJet P2015 is a decent text printer, but it's little faster than Samsung's ML-2510, our current Best Buy and was half as fast to print our graphical test. Though it's cheaper to run, it costs more than twice as much to buy. You'd need to print around 30,000 pages before it becomes better value and for most people that'll take nigh on forever. Unless you really need PCL or PostScript printing, we'd recommend the Samsung instead.