Product Reviews

The cost of colour laser printers has fallen a lot in the past year or two, but the corresponding cost of multi-function machines; which include a scanner so they can print, scan and copy; has lagged behind. HP's new outing into this market shows a better pricing though, at £248.

The Color LaserJet CM1312 MFP has been reworked from the ground up, with a new colour laser print engine and a very rounded, but rather elegant, design. Clothed in almost-black and almost-white, it looks vaguely like one of those short stepladders you find in libraries, with the laser printer section sticking out well in front of the scanner.

This version of the multi-function, the one without the letters 'nfi' after its name, has a simple flatbed scanner with no ADF mounted on top. The nfi version has ADF, fax modem and networking built in, all for an extra £70. The scanner on both machines has a resolution of 1200ppi and a colour depth of 24-bit, so is capable of scanning photos as well as business documents, though isn't up to handling transparencies.

Next to the scanner is a control panel, with a two-line, 16-character mono LCD. While the display isn't backlit, it's not that hard to read under overhead light. The controls would benefit from larger black and colour copy buttons, though. Menu navigation is handled by a peculiar toggle button, which tips left and right, and has an OK button set within it.

Unusually, the scanner section doesn't tip up to provide access to the print engine. This is because it doesn't need to; HP has engineered the whole of the colour print engine to slide out on two rails after you've folded down the front cover. Each of the four drum and toner cartridges simply slots

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in between the rails and slides away.

Maintenance could hardly be easier, though you will need to be sliding the cartridges out fairly regularly, as the black produces 2200 pages and the colour ones manage just 1400 pages each. In anything approaching a busy business, even a oneperson one, consumables are going to run down pretty fast.

HP obviously feels this machine will not have a busy life though, as the only paper tray has a capacity of just 150 sheets and there's no multi-purpose tray. There are inkjet printers with higher-capacity trays than that. At the back is a single socket for a USB 2 connection, the machine's only way of communicating with the world.

We weren't supplied with Mac drivers with our review sample, and had to download a little under 300MB of support software from the HP site. According to the site, Mac support isn't included in the box.

The machine is rated at 12ppm for black print and 8ppm for colour, but we don't think you'll approach those speeds if you include rasterising and print preparation time. Our five-page black text print took 48 seconds and the colour one took 63 seconds. These times translate to speeds of 6.25ppm and 4.76ppm, so this is not a quick machine.

HP uses its ColorSphere toner in the Color LaserJet CM1312, which is engineered to have particularly spherical particles and should therefore give clean print. We can vouch for the quality of the black text which, although printed at only 600dpi, looks very precise, with no signs of spatter or jagged lines. Colour print is equally as good, with vivid colours giving a lot of life to business graphics and promotional materials. Even colour photocopies were bright and closer to the originals than is often the case.

The only downside to all this brightness is photo print, never a strong suit for lasers. The test photos we printed looked over-saturated and rather like postcards, but with some work in the software, you might be able to calm them down.

Running costs are down to the prices of the drum and toner cartridges and the cheapest we could find produced figures of 2.7p for black and 11p for colour pages, which is high for the colour print. Overall, this is a lovely multi-function to use, and produces good results in black and colour, though it's expensive to run.