HP Laserjet 3015x review

The Laserjet 3015 is the latest in HP's range of laser multifunction devices with fax, printing, scanning and copying on offer. Speed is rated at a reasonable 14ppm for both printing and scanning; this may not be the fastest around, but it's quick enough not to leave you tapping your foot with impatience.

There's a 150-sheet input tray at the bottom of the machine, complete with dust cover, as well as a 30-sheet ADF at the top and a ten-sheet priority feed slot. Output is via a tray built to handle a busy day's workload.

In testing, we ran two 50-page document batches through the machine, one plain text, the other with a letterhead. Both jobs started after 14 seconds of processing, and completed after three minutes, 45 seconds - a rate of just over 14ppm. Text quality was superb, with impeccable clarity and darkness to the type and excellent contrast on the letterheads.

Our Excel spreadsheet comprising of closely contrasted cells, small fonts and a variety of graphs again failed to trip up the 3015. Even small white fonts on a black background retained crispness and legibility, and similarly shaded cells remained distinct. Graphs also looked highly professional.

Photographs and graphic images are traditionally a challenge for laser printers, but our demanding 24-page DTP test came out encouragingly well. There was slight banding evident on some images, but they displayed excellent contrast handling and definition. Complex graduations were no problem either. Most impressively, varied typefaces and font colours remained legible, even down to 4-point. There was a lengthy 35-second delay before the first page spooled, though, after which the document appeared at 14ppm.

Things slowed down for the five copies of our 5MB, four-page PDF document. After a 16-second processing time, the rate was down to 11ppm. Quality was again good, with no banding or contrast issues on photographic or line-drawn images, although there was no option to collate the copies.

Not having a flatbed option, this isn't an ideal photographic scanner. The results from complex images at 600dpi resulted in discernable noise, and the default PDF format output is far better suited to document archival - the latter of which is handled competently, if slowly, at 45 seconds per page. Handily, HP also bundles a copy of the very capable ReadIris Pro software to handle OCR duties.

Document copying is effective too, operating at just under 15ppm, and producing nearly identical copies on default settings.

The driver software contains basic finishing options, including resizing to fit to prescribed paper size and manual support for duplexing - no hardware option is available. There's also a browser-based status and configuration utility, although it doesn't update in real-time. There's no way of checking toner levels or the progress of a print job, either here or on the two-line front panel display, but it otherwise provides most of the facilities you need.

Overall, it's an impressive performance at this price, and there's little competition. If you really need a flatbed option, take a look at Lexmark's X215, although you'll pay an extra £130 for the privilege.

Author: Ross Burridge