grimjack2's Full Review: Hewlett Packard LaserJet 4050n Laser Printer
Are you looking for a printer for your office that needs to be a real workhorse? Then the Hewlett Packard 4000N may be just what you are looking for. This printer is network ready, prints great, prints fast, and can run constantly all day.
In an office I worked in years ago, each person had a separate Hewlett Packard 5L, or one of the various DeskJets. Once our new accounting package started to demand hundreds of sheets printed a week, we knew we had to upgrade. Back around 1997, the HP4000 was fairly new, cost only around $2000, and its printing speed of 17 pages per minute seemed almost too good to be true. The HP4000 was the company's first printer of this type. We later installed a network card into it, making it a HP4000N. As our printing demands grew, we eventually bought two more printers from this line, and one of which was the HP4050N.
The HP4050N comes with 16mb ram (upgradeable to 192 Mb), a HP JetDirect 10/100 Base TX print server card for connecting to a network, and a HP Fast Infra Red (FIR) receiver. Not having any laptops or machines with an IR device, I haven't been able to test the last one yet. But we have had it hooked up both directly to a network, and to a computer via a parallel cable, still functioning as a shared network printer. It works great either way.
The print quality is very good. It isn't color, but it does 220 levels of gray that look great when I'm printing out a color web page. It has a true 1200 dpi mode, but only prints at a native 600 dpi resolution when set to draft mode ('fastres' as opposed to 'prores'). I was hard pressed to see the difference between the two, even with fine design plans, and 4 point font sizes.
The toner lasts for around 10,000 pages, and costs around $130 (part# C4127A). This puts it at a much lower cost per page than any inkjet, and most smaller laser printers.
This printer is actually scalable, if you can imagine a printer being described that way. Aside from being able to add more memory, there are two expansion slots to add other network type connections, or hard drives (EIO cards) to store fonts. And you can stack multiple trays underneath the existing trays. That is what the T series of printer does. You can use the other trays exclusively for legal size, or envelopes and the drivers will know which tray to print from automatically. You could also use something like color paper, and use the software to select which tray to print from.
The printer itself is large and heavy. Too much so for home use, or people with limited desktop space. It weighs 40lbs without the toner cartridge or any paper! It is 24 ½ deep, 15 ½ wide, and 18 ½ tall. And if it isn't big enough already, an expensive duplexer can fit onto the back of the printer letting you print on both sides of a sheet of paper automatically. I don't know of anyone or business who has bought this for the extra $400 it costs.
For a little while Hewlett Packard put out a number of laser printers that had vertical feeders, like the 6L and most of their all-in-one office LaserJets. These tended to jam a lot and have problems, and I think HP phased the last of them out a few years ago. This printer is definitely more of the cube design, where the paper outputs from the top in a horizontal fashion. The trays are all underneath, and keep the paper horizontal. They hold 250 sheets of paper each, which is just fine, but the extra trays that the 4050T series has to offer are nice. For the lower trays, there is a paper level indicator that makes a nice visual reference when the paper is low.
The printers also have a rear output bin making a straight through paper path. This is great for the thicker items that you don't want going through curved rollers and out the top.
One of the only minor complaints I have about the design of the printer regards the power switch. It is hard to find by touch because it is sunken pretty far, and located on the lower right side. We actually stopped turning the printer off since it has a power down mode where it uses almost no energy. When a print command is sent, the printer wakes up quickly. The instant on fuser makes the printer able to print in 12 seconds.
The top panel has three lights: Ready, Data (working), and Attention, which is for when there is a problem. I've almost never seen a problem, but it does clearly give messages like "please insert envelope into tray".
There is also a large 'Go' button when it is waiting for user intervention, and a smaller cancel job button. The Go button is used to print stuff in the buffer, confirm a manual feed request, to turn it on and offline, and to resume printing after an error message.
To choose options from the top panel, there are the standard Menu and Item buttons to cycle through the general options. And there is a +/- button that clicks to the right or left which selects through items, or raises or lowers the value. There is also a single press select button. I particularly liked how all the menu commands and defaults can be printed into a very nice report.
The printer software is pretty good, and is far less intrusive than any of the DeskJet printing software. I like how the software is ready to be networked as a print server, and Windows machines on the network can pull the software across the network for instant printer setup. Networked Macintoshes can also print to it, but it is nowhere near as easy to configure or set them up.
The HP JetAdmin software is for the network administrator, and there is also client server for every printer that wants to access the printer across the network. There are some excellent diagnostic tools available with this too.
The HP Toolbox lets you check on the printer status, has some minor utilities, and an excellent help. It doesn't need to be installed, but I recommend it for any machine hooked up directly to the printer.
The HP Job Monitor will show all jobs currently in the queue, and let you control their print order and give you information on who is printing, and when they started it, etc..
HP Font Smart is a font management utility for windows which will allow you to install, uninstall and delete fonts. It looks fairly easy to use, but I haven't needed to play with it. If I was a desktop publisher, I could install a hard drive into the printer, and download or buy fonts (from HP I suppose) to use.
The printer driver lets you create 'quick sets' to save certain setups for different types of jobs. IE, changing the quality or resolution of the job. The paper type, which tray to use, etc.. I can see a lot of use for this in a legal office where they constantly have to switch between legal and letter sizes a lot, or else an office which has to alternate between draft and professional looking printing all the time.
One option that is interesting to try out is to automatically put a watermark on the back of every sheet. It does look good, but it is clearly not as good as paper that comes with a watermark on it.
Another interesting option is to select printing the first page on a different type of paper. I personally haven't had the need to use this, but if the first page needed to print on legal, like a map or cover, then it could be handy.
The coolest option that I've frequently used is the ability to print either two or four pages onto one standard sheet of paper. This is a good way to conserve paper, but the thumbnails are only just barely legible in draft or 600 dpi mode.
Something most users wont realize about the software drivers that is really handy is that if you go to print something and the printer is shut off, it will immediately start to print when you turn it back on. As an ex-desktop support person, I remember the annoyance of having to go to a person's desk, open up the print manager and select continue print whenever a printer became off-line. Sometimes even when a printer was out of paper, this would happen. Average computer users never figured out how to do this themselves, so this is a nice feature for people like me.
I was a little disappointed with the printer in that it doesn't have a good instruction book. Unlike the 4000 series which had a very detailed book, the 4050 series only comes with a relatively thin 30 page 'getting started guide'. There are more complete docs on the included CD-ROM in a .pdf file. I don't know why they dropped down the quality of the documentation, since I imagine their profit margin must be extremely high.
The small reference guide is actually very handy for someone who already understands printers. This can be kept right next to the printer, and is handy for people who just want to figure out what the menus on the top control panel, or the various feeder options are.
The printer only comes with a power cord, one toner cartridge, the printer software, and the printer documentation in the box.
When one of the office's HP 4000N printer's feeder trays broke, a repair guy from Hewlett Packard came out. He found out that the problem was that someone had flipped a lever the wrong way by accident so it was fine. But since he was out here, he also fixed a grinding problem from a loose fuser. He told us that these printers don't really need a service until they have printed 300,000 sheets! And that he has serviced at least one of these printers that has printed over 3,000,000 sheets, with only a few minor repairs.
The printer runs warm, but is designed to print all day at top speed. I believe it. This thing is the best workhorse printer I've seen. The newer models have generally the same engine but are a little faster, may print in color, and may be bigger. My guess is that they have generally the same engine because there is no need to mess with anything that works this well!
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