grimjack2's Full Review: Hewlett Packard LaserJet 3100 All-In-One Printer
Getting a multifunction device wasn’t what an office I worked in really needed. It just needed a new laser fax, and it turns out that the dedicated fax machines were more expensive than one of these multifunction ones were. I can only assume it is because the dedicated fax machines are aimed at a high-end business market that feels more comfortable paying higher prices.
The office equipment purchaser really wanted a laser device, and not one of the omnipresent ink jet machines. The HP 3100 is a laser device. This means that it isn’t color, but it is faster, produces crisper looking text, and is much cheaper to print each page. Aside from being a quality fax machine, the HP 3100 is also a printer, copier and scanner.
We hooked up the HP 3100 to also use as a laser printer, but since we have a really good HP 4000 laser printer in the same room, it is almost never used as such. The HP 4000 is a real workhorse that I doubt any multifunction machine could hope to keep up with. The HP 3100’s printing is okay, but compared to the speed and clarity of the 4000, it is at best just a distant second.
The HP 3100 has two vertical trays. One holds only 100 sheets of paper, and the other is for single feed printing. The fax will pull its blank sheets from the former. Although 100 sheets is a lot for most people, a horizontal tray model would probably hold 250 sheets.
The HP 3100 prints 600 dpi, scans 600 enhanced or 300 optical, has 256 levels of grey printing, and at six pages per minute. As a scanner it isn’t a flat bed that has become very common this Christmas season, but a form feed. It actually works fairly well, but if it were a flat bed, I wouldn’t have to tear magazine pages out to stick them through the sheet feeder. As a scanner it works fine for 8.5 x 14 copies, and I would put it equal with most of the $80 dedicated scanners out there.
As a copier, it works well in a pinch, but is not really needed in an office with a large dedicated copy machine like we have. Copying is very easy. You just insert the paper into the feeder and press the green copy button on the front.
Now for the real reason this machine was purchased. For its faxing capabilities. Here is where this machine shines over its other features. The modem is 14400 baud, which is above the average 9600 most dedicated machines have (but not modems).
The fax works great for an office that is constantly sending and receiving all day. One exceptionally nice feature is how it can be receiving a fax and printing out stored pages, but still you can still stick in new sheets to be scanned, and they will automatically be faxed out when the phone line is free. As a matter of fact, that is exactly what the display even says. It stores several pages in memory when sending out, so you can often have your originals in hand and be walking away from the machine before it has finished sending the first page. It only has two Megs of memory, which doesn’t sound like much, but how much more would it need? It seems to hold dozens of pages that include charts and diagrams with no problems at all.
The HP 3100 is very easy to program using the menus on the panel. I didn't even need to read the instructions to do it the first time. There are 10 one-touch keys, and 100 speed dials. I found it nice that special characters can be used that will wait for a dial tone in the dialing sequence, or can actually change the maximum transmission speed when you expect constant line noise. The group dials also work great, and are very easy to set up as well.
There are also some really nice reports that can be printed, or do print out upon demand. The speed dial list can come out in a variety of formats. When you have a fax error, it prints out a miniature version of the fax that failed in the middle of the page, and the comments are around it. This is very nice! When you send to more than one person, regardless of success or failure, it prints out a report listing all the numbers it was sent to, and if it worked or not. The fax log normally prints after 40 faxes have been sent or received, or you can do a manual one when you want to check a transmission out.
The front panel is full of buttons, but not too complicated. It has a keypad for numbers (and letters), a start/stop/cancel button for the fax, and other obvious buttons like speed dial, volume and power.
The contrast & resolution buttons are for fax or copy jobs only. The volume is for fax only, although I guess if there is a problem scanning it will beep at you. Manual dial, speed dial and redial are obviously for fax only as well.
For faxing, you have the option of standard, fine, superfine or photo levels of quality. One problem with the higher settings however is that the 2nd two aren't scanned before the fax connects due to memory limitations. I found it unusual that even if you add more memory, this still is not an option according to the instruction manual!?
We actually left it on the default setting of fine because we seldom send out anything requiring even superfine, and we like scanning the documents and leaving with them while the fax does its thing. The Standard resolution is 203x98 dpi, fine is 203x196, superfine is 300x300, and photo is 300x300 with halftone enabled.
One rather interesting thing that this fax, and I guess any HP fax, or actually any fax can use, is the HP test fax 800 number. HP has a fax 800 number set up specifically to test fax machines. After you first set up your fax, you dial the number, and a voice prompt asks to put in your fax #, and within a minute, the phone rang and a 2 page fax from HP came through. This is a really clever idea since one of the first things you want to do is make sure the fax works, and you are often curious how it will turn out.
I did find the included software to be a little intrusive. It isn’t necessary for anything other than scanning, but it can make it easy to fax without having to print something out first, or to manage multiple copies of things. When it is loaded, you see a little guy juggling pictures representing scanning, copying, faxing, and an icon to scan for the purpose of emailing. After a document has been scanned in, there appears a mail button that will open up your email software to send it. I guess it would be nice if I were more computer illiterate and just wanted a quick send, but I can't imagine ever using it myself.
As far as the hardware goes, I found this machine to open up very easily in order to clear jams and replace the cartridges. The cartridges are the same as those found in the HP5L and 6L printers, and the HP 3200 fax machine.
Now, on a really good piece of equipment, I shouldn’t know how easily it opens up to clear jams. Unfortunately, with this machine, I am abnormally familiar with clearing jams. The reason is that this printer jams all the time. So much so, that the office decided to upgrade to a HP 3200, but that was actually worse. It seemed a little poorer made, although I still wonder if we just got a lemon of a HP 3200 machine. So we kept the HP 3100 where it was, and use the HP 3200 as our backup fax.
The jamming seems worse the lower the paper left is. When it is too full, it cannot pull the paper through at all, and when the paper is low, it pulls multiple sheets through, making the paper left even lower, and thus exponentially increasing the number of blank sheets that it pulls through. This is a known problem, and there are even kits sold online to help reduce this in the HP 3100/3200 and even the older HP 5L & 6L printers. I would have to assume that all the vertical feed HPs have this problem. At our office, the fax master tries all sorts of tricks to get it to jam less. His most successful solution has been a piece of cardboard with a rubber band wrapped around it. This works pretty well, but not consistently enough.
In short, this machine has excellent features and quality, but its jamming is frustrating enough to almost not make me recommend it. Six months ago I would be much more likely to recommend this simply because of how well it does function, but as of this Christmas season, HP has dropped all of its vertical designs in lieu of horizontal trays and flat bed scanners. These are the better buys. Not really just because of the features, but because they will have considerably more memory, and the flat bed scanner is just much more useful.
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