HP LaserJet 2100TN review

With a street price of £705 including VAT, HP's 2100TN is at the expensive end of laser printers we see at Computer Buyer.

The standard 2100 is also available for about £500, but the TN version adds PostScript processing and direct network connectivity to the spec. Both machines produce 1,200dpi prints at up to 10ppm (pages per minute).

For the heavy-duty printing to which lasers are best suited, it's important that your printer can accommodate plenty of paper, of all the different sorts you want. The 2100TN has three paper drawers (the business standard), and together can hold up to 600 sheets.

The machine is built like the proverbial brick outhouse, and should last the course. We have experience of HP lasers still going after five, six or seven years, with no hiccups at all. In looks, it apes the 'professional' end of the HP range - it looks the business, the way we old fogeys remember laser printers. So it's not so much curvaceous as mean and moody: ready for anything you'd care to throw at it.

So with paper handling and build quality up to scratch, it's down to print quality and speed to determine whether the HP is worth its price tag. For text prints, the output quality is pretty much faultless, and very quick, too. However, the same can be said for nearly all modern laser printers, so its in the graphics tests that the quality is laid bare.

We tested using two documents. Our newsletter contains photographic images, text and a two-tone masthead, consisting of a white headline and a graphic on top of a colour-matched tint box. Our report contains text, business graphics (such as charts), and line art.

The HP's two modes of operation - PCL6 and PostScript - are like chalk and cheese. Photo images and greyscaling with the PCL6 driver were, frankly, not good. It spectacularly failed to produce accurately-matching greys in our newsletter masthead, whereas the PostScript emulation onboard handled it with aplomb. Business graphics, on the other hand, were handled equally well in either mode.

All kinds of claims are made by manufacturers regarding print speed, but they almost always concern the simplest of documents. Our test documents are designed to work the printers' engines to the full, with plenty of graphics and complex layout to slow them down. We print the files out from CorelDRAW!, and time the process from the moment we click the OK button to when the printout drops into the tray. We also pay attention to how quickly you get control of your PC back - some drivers really cripple your machine as they go about their business.

The HP is quite appaulingly slow in PCL6 mode - its PostScript mode being almost three times quicker. Subsequent copies do live up to the 10ppm spec, though, coming out every six seconds.

The HP also tied up our test PC quite badly while printing in PCL6 mode. It took some time for the HP driver to free up Windows 98, and trying to open another document while the PC was spooling out to the printer took more time than usual. Happily, in PostScript mode, the hogging of resources was far less intrusive. It's obvious which mode this LaserJet is best used in.

The HP LaserJet 2100TN is only really worth the money if you intend to work your printer into the ground. Its build quality ensures it will withstand the most intensive degree of office use, and keep on churning out the pages for years. For most home users, however, this is certainly overkill.