HP LaserJet M1319f review

Unlike other small-office laser MFPs we've seen from HP, the M1319f includes a sheet-feed scanner rather than a flatbed. This has several advantages over HP's equivalent flatbed MFPs such as the LaserJet M1120.

The 30-page ADF makes it easy to fax or copy multipage documents and is ideal if you want to scan lengthy documents for optical character recognition (OCR) or archiving. Scan speeds weren't much faster than those of an equivalent flatbed and, at two minutes and 36 seconds for a 10-page 150dpi scan, don't rival those of dedicated sheet-feed scanners designed for use in large offices.

We prefer HP's sheet-feed scanner driver to its equivalent flatbed interface. The preview button in this version performs the main scan of the document, after you've selected a scan resolution. You can then adjust settings before accepting the scan and saving to a file or sending to an OCR, editing or document management program. We saw excellent results without tweaking. The M1319f comes with ReadIRIS PRO 11.5, one of the best OCR programs, capable of rendering a scanned document into user-editable text and correctly positioned image scans.

All this is great if you want to scan large documents, but it's not ideal for scanning photos. There's no 6x4in size option in the driver, you're limited to a resolution of 600x600dpi and, although it's possible to feed photos into the scanner, there's a greater chance of damage to your photos than with a flatbed scanner.

Print speeds, while fast enough for an average home or personal office printer, were disappointing for an MFP that costs almost £200. Mono text was of high quality, with sharp lettering, but tiny 5pt text seemed broken even at an enhanced effective resolution of 1,200x1,200dpi. Pages were curled when they emerged from the printer, although this is a minor quibble. Emerging at 12.5ppm, our image-rich greyscale document prints were clear and accurately shaded. We were impressed with the nine-second time to first page. The printer took just a second to warm up from cold in our tests. Copy quality was poor, though.

The M1319f is a capable printer for text and graphics. However, this is a lot to pay for a mono laser MFP that has poor copy quality, only a USB interface and a print cost of 2.2p per page. If you need a sheet-feed fax/scanner in your office, then this is an economical option.

Author: Kat Orphanides