HP Color LaserJet CM2320fxi MFP review

HP's CM2320fxi MFP is equipped to fulfil every printing task a small to medium office needs to undertake, with a monthly duty cycle of up to 40,000 pages.

It has a fax machine, an automatic duplexer and a total paper capacity of 550 sheets of A4 thanks to its second paper tray.

There are memory card slots for SD, MMC, Memory Stick, CompactFlash and xD cards, which is unusual on a laser printer. The photo quality is good enough to make this useful. However, there's only support for image files, including JPEG and TIFF. We'd have liked support for more file formats, such as PDF, DOC and RTF documents.

A 2.4in colour screen lets you configure the most important settings. Not all options are available via the screen, though, so we were pleased to find that the printer's web interface was powerful and easy to use. You can use this to adjust colour density and auto-calibration cycles, and set the type of paper you're using in each tray.

Drivers are available for Windows and Mac OS X. The CM2320fxi will print any page sent in HP's standard PCL5c or PCL6 languages, which are well supported under most operating systems. The driver includes an animated guide to setting up the printer; the most difficult task was lowering the heavy printer on to its detachable paper tray.

The CM2320fxi uses the same print engine as HP's Color LaserJet CP2025N (Labs, Shopper 250) and takes the same toner cartridges. Print costs are above average, but toner is the only consumable, which makes this MFP easier to maintain than most lasers. It comes with full toner cartridges that can print 3,500 black and 2,800 colour pages. High-yield cartridges aren't available, though. The total cost of ownership is expensive, at £1,487 for three years' medium use (18,000 mono and 9,000 colour pages). Print costs are 1.9p for a mono page and 7.3p for a page of mixed colour and black.

Print quality was virtually flawless, with precisely rendered characters even at 5pt font sizes. Colour photos and illustrations were vivid and smoothly shaded. We also liked the 'No paper curl' mode in the printer's Service menu. This adjusts the fuser's temperatures based on your paper settings, so lightweight paper isn't overheated.

Print speeds were unremarkable for a printer at this price, with 15.3ppm for mono text and just 8.7ppm for our illustrated colour document. We had to wait 22 seconds for the first page, and several print jobs were interrupted by automatic self-cleaning cycles that seemed to occur every 30 pages or so.

The scanner drivers are an improvement on those with many of HP's older MFPs, but they're still not as good as those from Epson and Canon. You have to go through three different windows to change resolution, and previews and settings aren't retained between scans. Scan quality was sharp and colours accurate, and the 50-page ADF made it easy to scan entire documents at once. Photocopies were fairly quick, but copy quality wasn't brilliant, with a yellowish tinge. Some mono copies looked too dark, but this was easy to correct using the MFP's lightening settings.

Although its prints look stunning and its performance in other areas is passable, this MFP isn't as good as it should be. The scanner driver is disappointing, and the CM2320fxi is expensive to buy and run. It's been a while since we've seen a colour laser MFP that's impressed us, and we're still searching for one worthy of an award.

Author: Kat Orphanides