11 out of 11 people found this review helpful.
Continues the tradition of quality HP printer products
Date of Review: Jun 27, 2000
HP has a very good reputation for printers and it's justified. I have used other HP products and other brands of laser printers and the 2100 is a great mid-priced home/office printer. I have owned it for about a year and in that time I have not had any unpleasant surprises. It is not especially fast or quiet, but it works as promised. The paper path is well laid out so that jams are extremely rare. For thicker or more delicate paper you can open the front and back of the unit to provide a straight paper path - this feature is not found on many laser printers in this price class. The toner capacity is apparently quite good because I have printed through at least 2000 sheets and there has been no variation in the print output nor indication that toner is running low.
One of the features which causes me to highly recommend this printer is the power-on behavior. If you start a print job in Windows with the printer turned off, then turn the printer on it will print correctly. I have used other brand laser printers which will lose some control characters in that situation and begin printing pages and pages of gibberish. The 2100 also powers up quite quickly and seems to have a very efficient low-power mode (no heat or noise). Lesser brand laser printers can be heard cycling through heating/cooling cycles when left idle.
The final feature which I found to be quite useful on this printer is the irDA port. This is an infrared transceiver on the front panel of the unit which allows you to print without cables. I have used this with my Windows CE handheld PC and it works flawlessly. This can also be easily used by any modern laptop equiped with the IR port. To use this feature of your laptop, simply enable irDA support on your laptop from the control panel and it becomes a virtual LPT port. You can then create a printer driver link which uses the new virtual printer port.
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