HP LaserJet 4050TN

No matter who you are, if you work in an office the chances are you've used a Hewlett-Packard printer at some time in your life. It's hardly surprising considering the company's long history and excellent track record but, despite this, product development continues apace, with new products replacing old ones at a bewildering rate. This month it's the turn of the LaserJet 4000 (reviewed issue 39, p176) to be superseded.

Taking its place is the LaserJet 4050 range. Physically, the new printers look much the same as before, but the real changes have taken place elsewhere. Processing power has been beefed up from 100MHz to 133MHz, standard memory has doubled to 16Mb and print speed increases marginally from 16ppm to 17ppm. Top true resolution is still an impressive 1,200 « 1,200dpi, and PostScript 2 and PCL6 emulations are included in the price.

Also new to the 4050TN are its 'Job Retention' features, which give users more control over their print-outs. These allow jobs to be stored locally on the optional 2Gb hard disk (£400) and accessed directly from the printer's control panel. The Proof-and-Hold feature prints the first copy of a job for checking before completing the job and you can prevent sensitive documents printing until a four-digit PIN is entered at the control panel.

A quick peek around the rear of the machine reveals an impressive array of connection options with parallel and serial ports, a JetDirect dual-speed print server card for network printing and even a Fast Infrared Receiver (FIR). Paper-holding duties are taken care of by two A4-sized 250-sheet trays, and a flip-down 100-sheet multipurpose tray brings the total capacity to 600. The option is available, of course, to boost this by a further 500 sheets.

The toner cartridge sits under a flap at the top front of the machine, as usual. If you plump for the large 10,000-page capacity cartridge and add in the cost of the maintenance kit, the lowest printing costs pan out to a reasonable 1.26p per page.

Like the 4000TN before it, the 4050TN is also JetSend enabled, which allows direct device-to-device communication over TCP/IP and does away with the need for printer drivers. However, even a year after its announcement, JetSend-enabled devices are still thin on the ground, with few third-party vendors showing any real commitment to the technology.

Installation is commendably smooth no matter what option you choose. With HP's JetAdmin in action, I managed to get the 4050 installed on a Novell NetWare 5 network in a matter of minutes. One of the most fully-featured print administration tools around, JetAdmin allows print queue, user and group NDS objects to be created, and printing privileges to be assigned and managed with the minimum of effort. For Internet administration there's HP's WebJetAdmin, although this must be installed on a system that's running Windows NT 4. During driver installation you can also create a JetDirect Port to allow users to print directly to the LaserJet over TCP/IP.

HP printers rarely disappoint when it comes to speed and the 4050TN is no exception. Using a simple 15-page Word document, we found all three of the resolutions on offer delivered a tidy 17ppm, with a time to first page of under ten seconds. It's hardly surprising that speed slipped when printing the 23-page PC Pro mono laser test with its heavy formatting, graphics and large photographic images at 1,200dpi, but 11.5ppm was more of a dip than I'd expected.

Printing over the infrared link elicited a decent rate of 17ppm for plain text, but the more complex document stretched it to breaking point, taking over 11 minutes to finish at maximum resolution.