HP Laser Jet 4200 n Printer

The HP Laserjet 4200n is the standard printer in my office. We have several of them around.

The LaserJet 4200n is the base configuration for HP's line of 35 pages-per-minute workgroup printers. For text documents, it provides good quality at a relatively rapid pace. Printed text is extremely crisp in the full range of fonts and font sizes our office uses. Sadly, the speed is not up to par when one asks it to deal with graphics or a mix of graphics and text. Graphics do exhibit well-defined edges; the time required is just excessive. Further, since it is operates only in black and white, it is limited in what it can offer for graphics production. This is a workhorse printer for a busy office that needs a fast text printer; if you need a lot of presentations or brochures I'd recommend looking elsewhere.

The LaserJet measures 16.4 inches wide by 16.9 inches deep by 14.4 inches high. It weighs about 45 pounds before you add a print cartridge or paper. The machine is solidly built. This is not a printer that one is going to want to move around often. A word of warning about where you put it; the machine emits a low hum when turned on but not running. Printing, however, can be noisy. I would recommend putting this in an area that doesn't back up directly to someone's workspace.

When our office purchased this printer, it came with an IEEE 1284-compatible parallel interface; no cable was included, though HP would sell one to you. It also lacked the USB port that you can find on other printers in this class. Whether HP has updated this situation since our purchase, I cannot confirm. The LaserJet 4200n has room for two network cards, also not included; an Ethernet upgrade and a token-ring connection are both available for an additional cost. An optional HP high-capacity hard drive is also available.

Controls on the front panel are simple enough for the average user to understand. There is one button that pauses a job, and another button that cancels a job. Two arrow buttons let you scroll through menu options, such as paper handling, configuring the device, checking diagnostics, etc. A third button lets you make a choice, and a fourth lets you undo it, moving back up through menu levels. For questions about menu selections, there's even a question mark (?) button. The power control is far towards the back on the printer's left side. It's easy to find if you're looking for it, but it's not going to accidently be turned off. There are three indicator lights marked Attention, Data, and Ready.

The LaserJet 4200n comes with basic features and room to add on. For example, the 48MB of standard RAM should be able to juggle a small-office print queue, but if you need more memory, you can be expanded. When we got ours several years ago, it was possible to upgrade to 416MB. I suspect today it can be upgraded further.

The LaserJet's basic paper handling starts with a 500-sheet main input tray that sits underneath the printer and slides out from the front for reloading The main output tray sits atop the printer and can take up to 250 sheets. A 100-sheet multipurpose input tray folds out from the front and handles envelopes, index cards, thick media, and odd sized paper. Paper handling abilities can be expanded. HP has a 1,500 sheet input tray, an envelope feeder and a two-drawer unit that are all compatible. Our office has the two drawer option on most machines. This has two drawers of 500 sheets each. In our office, we use one for letterhead and one for plain paper. This option works very well in my section. In other sections that do not require the use of letter head as often, the duplex tray is used to hold additional plain paper.

In the end, my division turns out huge quantities of letters to customers. Sadly, we share the printer with marketing who consistently prints presentations. If this printer was used only by our department, I would love it. As it is, I recognize its strong points and its shortcomings.

If your office needs primarily to do text documents, and needs a good basic printer than can be expanded as your needs change, this would be a good entry point. We've had ours in the office for about three years and have been happy with it.