HP LaserJet M1522nf review

HP's feature-packed LaserJet M1522nf is the only MFP here with a built-in fax machine, useful for a small office.

It also has an Ethernet port. Network installation went smoothly, but was slow, and the full printer driver installation took up 500MB of disk space. The installer correctly auto-detected the printer, and all we had to do was set it as the default.

Printed diagrams and illustrations looked great and photos were grainy but accurately shaded. We tested print quality at the native resolution of 600x600dpi and the enhanced 600x1,200dpi print mode, which produced marked improvements in image print quality. Small text was also made more solid and readable. The printer defaults to this mode, which slowed print speeds by only a few seconds in our 24-page mixed text and graphics document print test.

It was the fastest MFP when printing text, managing 20.5ppm, but our mixed text and graphics documents printed more slowly at 8.9ppm. Copy quality was terrible, with poor contrast. Copies were either dark and murky or too pale, depending on the lightness setting.

Scanning over the network worked well, but HP's scanner interface closes between every scan without saving settings, and made a time-consuming high-resolution preview scan every time we opened it. Scan quality was good, with accurate colours and sharp focus. HP also ships the excellent ReadIRIS Pro OCR package.

This has the lowest cost per page of any MFP here, and will be the cheapest of the MFPs to run over three years, as long as you're a heavy user. It also has more features, with 64MB of RAM, the PCL 6 and 5e page description languages and an automatic document feeder for its scanner/copier.

HP's M1522nf is good value for such a well-specified MFP, produces high-quality prints and has reasonable running costs. It's let down by HP's annoying scan interface and poor-quality copies, though. Canon's i-Sensys MF4010 is a better all-round MFP.

Author: Kat Orphanides