Hewlett Packard Laserjet 1100a review

Hewlett-Packard has pioneered multifunction devices that both print and scan, and now even its entry-level LaserJet has been designed so that it can accommodate an low-cost clip-on scanning module.

The straight LaserJet 1100 costs about £235 (£273) on the street, and with the scanner attached it becomes the LaserJet 1100a and costs just £50 more!

The plain HP LaserJet 1100 is rather hefty, measuring around fifteen inches cubed and weighing just over 16lbs, so can be quite an imposing feature on your desktop. Its single paper bin, which can handle up to 125 sheets of 75gsm paper, is located towards the back, while the output tray is vertical and sited at the front. This echoes the LaserJet 6 arrangement, and means paper must do a 180-degree turn during printing to arrive at the output bin.

Build quality, typically for HP, is good. The size and weight of the printer give it an overall solid feel, which is enhanced when you insert the toner cartridge assembly.

Setting up the printer is as straightforward as you could wish. For the scanner, you install the ReadIris OCR software as well as TWAIN drivers. The whole process is easily handled by a standard 'setup' routine, rather than plug and play, which is more usual for printers.

The driver offers pretty standard options, plus a 'Finishing' section, which manages manual duplexing and thumbnailing. It also controls toner density - offering the 'economode' of previous LaserJets. Indeed, running the 1100a is simple: everything is controllable from the driver, whose defaults are eminently satisfactory.

Unlike inkjets, lasers don't do colour, so they must produce impressive black-and-white prints to compete. The LaserJet 1100a handled our newsletter document very well indeed. At 600dpi (the unit's top resolution) blacks were dense and positive, with no jagged edges visible without a magnifying glass. Greyscaling was punchy and accurate, with little sign of undesirable artefacts in the dithering. Our report document features so-called 'business graphics', which the 1100a printed equally well. Again, greyscaling was good, even though some very fine white lines got slightly filled in at times. The ordered dithering showed no tendency to moir?patterning or tartaning. The unit lived up to the 8-page-per-minute billing, and was very quiet.

The scanner simply slips over the paper output tray of the main printer. It is secured with a small blue lever on its underside, making all the necessary connections as it does so. Thereafter, even with the PC switched off, you can make photocopies of any document.

With the PC on, you scan in either bitmap or OCR mode. At setup time, all the applications you have that can accept scans are set up to do so (under full user control), and the necessary drivers and applets installed. The next restart places a Document Assistant icon in your system tray, which you can use to scan to hard disk, photocopy or OCR text. You can also ask that scans be faxed using your modem and fax software, or sent via e-mail.

The scanner is sheet-fed and produces 600dpi greyscale images (with 256 levels of grey). It has an automatic document feeder, so you can drop in a pile of documents and let the unit get on with it. In our tests, the scanner/copier section performed admirably, and adds significantly more value than the £50 it costs.

Overall, then, the HP LJ1100a may look a bit of an unwieldy lump on the desktop, but it functions very nicely indeed. Its good quality and speedy printing, coupled with the very nice touch of scanning and copying facilities, make the VAT-inclusive street price of well under £350 look something of a bargain.