HP Laserjet 4300dtn review

HP has a huge range of laser printers, stretching from enormous 50ppm A3 corporate behemoths with full finishing capabilities to diminutive 10ppm personal lasers. Of all the printers in its considerable arsenal, though, its biggest seller by far is the Laserjet 4100 series. In fact, HP claims that the 4100 series is the world's biggest-selling laser printer. With this grand title comes a slight problem: how to supersede the most super of all mono lasers. HP's response is the new Laserjet 4200 and 4300 series, which not only improve on the 4100, but positively blow it out of the water.

The 4100 series already offers a decent output speed of 25ppm. However, for those who require a little more grunt for slightly larger or more demanding offices, HP has introduced the 4300 series. We reviewed the 4300dtn, which features networking, automatic duplexing and a second paper tray. Externally, it doesn't look too dissimilar to its predecessor the 4100n (see Reviews, issue 79, p177). The most significant change is the new LCD control panel, which provides four lines of settings information instead of the 4100n's two.

However, delve beneath the surface and the 4300dtn is a totally different animal. You want high-performance office printing? How does 45ppm grab you? This is an incredible 80 per cent performance boost over the 4100n and even comes close to matching the A4 performance of HP's Laserjet 9000dn 50ppm departmental laser printer.

The 4300dtn comes with 80MB of memory, so huge print jobs can be processed. Some of this memory may even be used as a RAM drive, allowing for security features such as proof and hold and secure print without needing the optional 10GB hard disk. It's possible to upgrade memory to a maximum of 416MB via the three available DIMM sockets, with a 128MB upgrade from HP costing a whopping £757. We asked HP if industry-standard DIMMs (priced as low as £16 for the same capacity!) would also work and it reservedly confirmed they would, although the warranty would be invalidated if any problem could be attributed to using them.

The new high-performance print engine makes the 4300dtn suitable for use in medium-sized workgroups. The enhanced duty cycle of up to 200,000 pages a month and paper capacity of 1,100 A4 sheets mean it can certainly cope with the demands of a busy office.

HP has also increased the capacity of its smart toner cartridge to 18,000 pages. The cartridge costs £170, which equates to fairly high costs of 1.1p per A4 page at 5 per cent coverage. That said, the smart toner cartridge does offer other benefits, such as relaying accurate information about its remaining capacity via the built-in web server, and it's also designed to provide the same quality output even when almost empty.

Setting up the printer is a simple affair, thanks to the Wizard-driven installation software, which also detects and attempts to configure printers connected to the network. We experienced a slight hitch when the Wizard couldn't successfully install a TCP/IP port, but this was easy to correct manually after the Wizard had completed.

We tested the 4300dtn installed on a small network using TCP/IP. First up was the ubiquitous 50-page plain text test printed at the default FastRes 1200 setting. The HP finished the test in a just over a minute at a blistering speed of 45ppm. Text quality was good too, although there was a slight feathering around some edges, unlike the sharper results from the 4100n.

The 12-page Excel spreadsheet test is often a stumbling block for lasers, with the block-shaded backgrounds and fine-point text proving too much to handle. The 4300dtn also found it tough, managing the larger font sizes well but slightly blurring the finer point text. That said, it's still easily readable and better than most mono lasers we've seen. We've no qualms about speed, though, printing at 44ppm.