Product Reviews

There's no doubt that small businesses looking for a multifunction device for centralised printing, faxing, scanning and copying are now spoilt for choice. However, many vendors have failed to note that this very same target market is also likely to have a network installed and will want to share all the functions among its users. A good example is Samsung's SF-8500P (reviewed issue 64, p161) as only the printer functions can be shared over a network but the manual doesn't even discuss this topic. With the release of the LaserJet 3150, HP has addressed this problem with networking high on the agenda. It supports printer sharing as standard and, when connected to a compatible HP JetDirect print server, the fax, scanning and copying facilities can also be networked. However, the print server will add around £200 more to your initial outlay.

The LaserJet 3150 offers plenty of other new features such as assigning billing codes to outbound faxes and blocking up to 30 incoming phone numbers. Documents can be scanned directly into an email message as an attachment and the speed dial keypad can be configured with up to 250 fax numbers or email addresses. Recipients can view these attachments easily, even without the appropriate application installed as HP includes a HotSend utility that wraps itself around the attachment so it arrives as an executable file. See www.hotsend.com for more information about HotSend.

The LaserJet 3150 is well built with its curved chassis surrounding a 600dpi mono laser print engine with a 6ppm quoted top speed. The scanner unit has a top true resolution of 300ppi that can be enhanced to a simulated 600ppi using software interpolation, while fax duties are dealt with by an internal 14.4Kbits/sec modem. The Type C parallel port is a useful feature as this supports cable lengths of up to 10m so you can position the printer well away from the host PC. Only a 3m cable is supplied while a longer version is an optional extra. Paper capacity for printing is 100 sheets of A4 or ten envelopes held in a rear input bin with a single-sheet feeder in front. Output capacity is also 100 sheets, and a manual lever redirects

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output to the front slot for a straighter path through the printer. Alas, printing costs are uncomfortably high as the toner cartridge (£49) delivers 2,500 pages at five per cent coverage, which equates to nearly 2p per page - around 40 per cent more than the Samsung SF-8500P.

As the 3150 is a GDI printer, the host PC specification will determine print speed. We used a Pentium/266 system with Windows 98 SE installed and saw a 15-page document completed at an average of 5.3ppm. A 24-page DTP-style document was completed at a rate of 5.1ppm, while scanning an A4 photograph to the host PC at 600dpi took a shade over five minutes. Manual copies were delivered efficiently. Scanning a document and creating ten copies took a total of two minutes.

Although text print quality was very good, Samsung made a better job of graphics and photographs. The LaserJet 3150 produced more detail but images suffered from an unsightly banding and results from scanning and printing an A4 photograph at 300ppi were actually better than those at the simulated 600ppi. Our five-page test business report was handled better as the various grey shades in the graphs were faithfully reproduced with minimal stepping in the edges of the pie charts.

The front control panel is well designed and easy to navigate. Copying and fax operations can be run without the host PC switched on, and HP reckons the 2Mb of internal memory can store up to 150 pages of incoming faxes. Group distribution lists can be made for broadcasting faxes, and the LaserJet 3150 will scan and store the pages internally before sending them to each member of the group. It can also perform multiple functions simultaneously so you could be copying or scanning directly to a PC while printing another document.

HP bundles JetSuite and ReadIris OCR (optical character recognition) software with the printer. JetSuite is a comprehensive package that allows all the functions of the LaserJet 3150 to be controlled from the host PC. It gathers all the various functions into a single interface, making it easy to keep track of faxes and scanned documents. It senses when a page has been placed in the feeder and a Document Assistant utility pops up providing quick access for scanning, faxing or copying. All device settings can be accessed and configured from within JetSuite and even the speed dial buttons can be programmed from the PC.

As is usual with most multifunction devices, the price you pay for total integration is average print quality, although the number of features on offer goes some way to make up for this. At only £495, the LaserJet 3150 is far better value than Samsung's SF-5800P and is the best choice if you want all its functions available on a network.