Product Reviews

With an already popular range of laser printers, from the colossal corporate machines to personal 10ppm printers, HP has added to its LaserJet 4000 series - the workhorses of mono laser printers.

This particular model is an update to the well-known and much-liked 4300dtn, which has resided on our A List for nearly two years. Indeed, the 4350dtn not only looks similar, but is also the same size - 418 x 451 x 498mm (WDH). HP seems to have found an effective desktop mono laser-printer package.

We hooked it up through a small network using TCP/IP and quickly managed to have everything installed and configured.

The results from our printing tests were of the high standard we expect. Speeding through 50 pages of plain text in a little over a minute (including 12 seconds of processing time), the 4350dtn averaged 68ppm - incredibly impressive for a printer of this size. Our 50-page letter printed at the same speed, taking only a second longer to process. The quality of both was excellent, with flawless text and no dithering evident on letterhead graphics. A complex 12-page Excel spreadsheet also proved no problem, appearing in a shade under 30 seconds. Only half of that time was spent processing, giving the quoted 55ppm

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print speed. Again, quality was high, with no degradation or banding on solid blocks of shading.

Our 24-page DTP test, comprising of multiple font and graphic types, appeared at a rate of 57ppm, taking 38 seconds to complete including processing time. Quality was high on both varying sizes of text, and toner was evenly applied on solid areas.

Five copies of an 8MB four-page PDF also failed to prove much of a challenge, taking 17 seconds to process and 45 seconds to appear, at a rate of 43ppm. Both greyscale and white text on black text was handled well, although complex photographic images showed a loss of detail, and occasionally perceptible banding.

It was a similar story with our 31MB photo montage. Overall quality was reasonable, but degradation appeared on images, most notably due to weak contrast among lighter tones. Contrast between neighbouring dark and light was better but, as with most laser units, photographic reproduction still proves to be a weakness. You'll find few issues with the majority of web pages, reports or presentations though. Sizeable blocks of black are crisply finished, and graduations show no uneven banding; even serifed text at four-point font size is still clearly legible.

The 4350dtn is a robust, versatile and well-constructed printer, producing consistently high-quality results, and giving the comfortable feeling that it could take a heavy print pounding. It also warms up and begins printing in an extremely impressive 23 seconds from Sleep mode. That's a substantial speed advantage compared to the majority of the competition, particularly for small jobs. Printing costs are reasonable too, working out at 0.83p per page (excluding paper). With such flexibility and speed, the 4350dtn is an ideal package for small-to-medium-sized offices with heavy print demands.