Pros: Inexpensive, compact, good quality output, cartridges widely available, HP are justly famous for their printers.
Cons: Throwing away drum with toner cartridge offends my ecological side. No HP cartridge recycling program.
The Bottom Line: An excellent little printer for moderate home use. No problems installing on a 350MHz PC with 256MB RAM, USB1.1, running Windows 2000 Pro.
goggoose's Full Review: Hewlett Packard LaserJet 1012 Printer
I'm not going to write a long review as others have done very comprehensive ones, but I'll add my experience.
I had needed a better printer for a long time, my old HP694C (see separate review) seemed to be close to expiring. So when I saw an ad from Staples offering a Samsung ML1740 laser for a good price ($100 in rebates!) I hurtled off for a look. In fact I didn't like the cheap white plasticky look of the Samsung but I did find a snazzy Darth Vader-ish black Lexmark E232 which also seemed a good buy and had the nice feature of the paper tray completely enclosed within the body of the printer. When I eventually got a salesperson's attention I started asking questions.
I quickly became aware that I was sadly ignorant about consumer level lasers (I've been spoiled at work by high-end gear) and when the guy said why not go for the HP1012 refurbished model I realised I'd have to go home and do more research.
Amazon, Future Shop and Epinions to the rescue! I researched Lexmarks, Brothers, Samsungs and HPs and in the process discovered that my dream of running printers off a print server rather than having to leave a PC on all the time was rubbish at my budget level.
Print servers are a whole other topic but I will digress a little because I'm sure many people who consider themselves PC-literate may not have much knowledge about networking a printer.
There are two ways to network a printer. One is to install it on a PC and then "share" it with other PCs on the network. This works fine but requires the relevant PC to be left on otherwise the other PCs on the network will not be able to access the printer. Also, it will affect the performance of the host PC if you try to run processor-intensive stuff such as Half-Life simultaneously. But it is cheap.
The other way is to attach it to a network print server which means there is no PC to do the host processing. Thus either the printer must be able to do all its own processing or the print server must do it. So inexpensive "network option" printers such the Lexmark E232 (which do not contain the smarts) are likely only networkable with an expensive matching brand, purpose-designed print server (which does) not a cheaper, generic device such as D-Link or Linksys (which probably doesn't). Non-networkable (also called "host-based" or "GDI") printers like the HP1012 cannot be networked in this way because the only suitable processing power is in the PC. More expensive professional lasers will have the processing smarts inside and often have the networking card built in too...all you do is plug in the Ethernet cable.
Anyway, back to the review. The many very favourable reviews of the HP1012 convinced me that it was best for my purpose. Nobody seemed to have much bad to say except some folk had had problems installing the software, but some of those reviews were a bit old, so I hoped that HP might have fixed those problems. Or maybe they were confined to older Windows versions.
So for CAN $176 I got the refurbished product (full 1yr HP warranty but $120 less than brand new) and went about unpacking and installing. The reviews had already told me about the missing USB cable so picked up a 10ft one beforehand at a little computer store rather than the pricey ones in Staples. Some of the reviews had me a bit concerned about the USB1.1 ports on my elderly 350MHz AMD PC but the printer box clearly stated USB1.1 or 2.0 so I didn't worry. I assembled the printer, stuffed paper in it, plugged the AC and USB cables in, but didn't power it on or plug the USB cable into the PC.
As the instructions state install the software first and I know from experience that plugging a USB device in without doing this can really mess up one's PC, I did exactly as I was told. The install went straight-forwardly and when, as one reviewer has mentioned, it asks you to plug in the printer part way through I did that and powered it on. Up popped "Found new hardware HP Laserjet 1000 series", Windows installed the drivers and that was that. It was so easy I can't remember much about it. Printed a test page and Bob was my uncle. I did try draft mode but it was too faint for my aged eyes to read easily. I'd probably use it if I were printing a lengthy document that I knew I'd need to edit.
I've only had it a few days so I cannot report on performance, heat, double sided printing, toner consumption or any of that stuff. All I know is that the print is quite acceptable (remember I've been spoiled by $5,000 and up HPs and Lexmarks at work and there is no question that they are better and faster!), it works and the somewhat slow PC has no problem hosting it. I am confident that it will perform exactly as others have reported.
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