Small businesses and high-end consumers who need high-speed color printing need to look no further than HP's new CM1017. This is a great, multi-function laser printer that does it all.
I once spent about $600 for a black and white dot-matrix printer that used ribbons, so I am amazed at the price of printers these days. For a list price of $699, HP is delivering color laser printing, color copying, color scanning, color direct digital photograph printing, black-and-white printing, black-and-white copying, black-and-white scanning and black-and-white direct digital photograph printing. The only thing missing is fax capability.
If you have a small office with color printing needs beyond a deskjet printer, this ought to be your first stop. It has a recommended rate of 500 to 1,500 copies per month.
The printer is heavy, about 50 pounds, so make sure you have an adequate work surface. It's also pretty tall — about 21 inches — so don't expect to stick it on a shelf somewhere.
Unpacking the box is simple. After you install four print cartridges (black, cyan, magenta and yellow) and install the software, you're ready to go. (Oops, no you're not, because HP has neglected to include the $1 cable ... a major pet peeve of mine. I agree that some offices may need more than a 6-foot USB cable or even use the built-in Ethernet, but even so, throwing a cable or two in the box would be a nice gesture.)
Installing the software takes a while, but it went fine on Windows XP and Mac OSX. You also can install it on Linux, but I didn't try it.
Color output was exceptional on this printer when compared to my deskjet printers, as you'd expect from a color laser. (The trick for this in a small office is to keep people from printing all manner of personal stuff on it and making your cartridge bill go out the window.)
Of course the trick to saving money on toner, which is the way printing companies make money, is to print everything except the final version in draft-quality black and white.
HP, like nearly everyone else, buries the printer settings so it's not terribly easy to make a draft copy but once you get the hang of it you can set that as the default and change to high-quality color only when needed.
The printer has four media card slots, so you can just insert the media cards from your digital cameras and look at your images on a bright 2.5-inch LCD screen. That's nice if you don't have a PC handy and just want to directly print your images.
This is a pretty unusual feature for office-oriented printers, so real-estate agents and others who use photographs a lot may find this compelling. (The printer has 94 megs of RAM onboard which you can upgrade to 225 megs if you print photos a lot.)
Replacing toner cartridges is a snap; just flip open the front panel and take one out and pop one in. New cartridges are $70 to $85 depending on which one you need. Each one is rated for about 2,500 pages for black and 2,000 pages for color.
All in all I liked this a lot and if you don't need fax it's a solid choice.
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