Hewlett-Packard LaserJet P2014 review

When choosing a mono laser printer for your home or home office, you're faced with the dilemma of how much to spend.

Many models can be picked up cheaply, but usually come with slower speeds and slightly higher costs per page. On the other hand, you can spend more initially and benefit from cheaper running costs, more features and faster speeds. HP's LaserJet P2014 sits firmly in the latter category.

As mono printers go the P2014 is expensive, but it has a lot going for it to justify that initial outlay. For a start it's very simple to set up: just slot the CD in the drive and follow the thorough step-by-step photos until all the safety tape is removed and your toner is correctly installed. Then you can load 250 sheets of paper into the main tray. There's also a useful flip-down tray on the front that holds 50 sheets and is ideal for envelopes and other types of paper. This means that you can load your printer with two types of paper, and simply select which you want to print to from the driver.

Then there's the print speed: HP quotes 23ppm for A4 and that's almost precisely what we achieved in our Normal speed test. Better still, it achieved this not only in economy mode, which produces pale text but is still perfectly legible, but also in normal 1,200dpi mode. There is simply no speed difference between any of the P2014's quality settings. You can now choose what quality to use based entirely on economic concerns, rather than having to worry about speed.

If you go for the best quality you'll be delighted with the results, as our text documents were crisp, thick and had no visible spidering or roughness. The printer even did a reasonable job on our 6x4in test photographs, so you can rest assured that graphics and images will be reproduced to a satisfactory standard. The only slight annoyance is the lack of a progress window to keep track of jobs, so you've got no idea how busy the printer is.

The P2014 offers the choice of USB and parallel connections, so you'll be fine however old your PC is, and there are high-yield toner cartridges available to cut costs for heavy users. These give the P2014 a running cost of around 1.2p per page, which is up there with the best of them and really helps to offset some of the high price. So if you're looking for fast, high-quality prints at a decent price, you should consider paying a bit extra for the HP P2014, as the low cost per page will start paying you back almost straight away.