Definitely A Species of Dinosaur That Should be Extinct -- The HP LaserJet 4 Printer

Hewlett-Packard has been making Laserjet printers seemingly forever. I started dealing with this company when working with reports and documents using a Laserjet II printer eons ago. Well, may be not eons ago, but it’s been a long while!

As technology went forward so did our inventory of printers leading me to direct contact with a monster of a printer that unfortunately is rather obsolete – the HP LaserJet 4 printer.

The HP LaserJet 4 Printer

The HP LaserJet 4 printer is a dinosaur when it comes to Hewlett Packard technology. This printer is absolutely huge and heavy weighing over 50 to probably 60 pounds, depending on trays and toner installation. The printer itself was great when it was new, but is way too bulky and slow for our current needs. Moving this printer takes at least two people because of its size and weight, and several of these printers have been dropped in the past.

Also, because of the size and weight of this printer, it is difficult to find an area to place it on conventional cubicle workstations. Most of the time the HP LaserJet 4 printer has to be placed on a sturdy table or metal file cabinet, and even then the bottom may sag with extended use.

For the record, the HP LaserJet 4 printer prints 600 dpi, and about 8 pages per minute. The print on these documents depends on the toner cartridge. While it is true that toner for these printers is extremely cheap, I have found that because of the recycled cartridges used within the LaserJet 4 printers that this causes spillage, smudges, and eventually causes problems within the printer itself.

The HP LaserJet 4 printer prints through at least two trays. One of them is a manual feed where one page at a time can be fed. Another tray fits near the bottom of the printer and holds probably about 100 to 200 sheets of paper, depending on thickness. While labels can be printed in the HP LaserJet 4, I do not suggest that you even attempt doing that even with feeding in the manual tray. I’ve had to try to attempt to get labels out of this machine and it is a royal mess – wasting more time than if you would have typed the labels in the typewriter.

Memory in these printers depends on whether or not the previous owner updated them. The printer can have from 2 to perhaps 6 MB of RAM within them and can be networked using an HP Jet Direct card.

Because of the fact that these printers can be networked, that gives the HP LaserJet 4 printer a plus. However, to be perfectly honest with you, because of the slowness of these printers in comparison to other newer HP printers, I do not believe it would be cost efficient. It would probably be better to have separate printers, providing you have the space for it.

Types of Print Jobs

Most of the print jobs that were printed on the HP LaserJet 4 printers were Word Perfect documents and forms that were created in a program called Xtrieve. These used very basic print fonts such as Times Roman and Arial, and only basic features such as underline, bold, and italic.

Service

Service from HP has always been great with these types of printers. The most common repair, other than cleaning these printers, has been to replace the fuser assembly. It got to be so common at times that many of us learned how to replace that ourselves. Of course, that's been a long time ago, and I don't know if I could do it again, but I do remember how to clean these machines and it was a true pain!

Recommendation

Because of the fact that the HP LaserJet 4 printer is a piece of hardware that essentially outdated, I really do not feel comfortable recommending it for purchase, especially online. With it’s tremendous weight, I can not even imagine what kind of horrendous shipping charges you would incur by purchasing this printer at an online vendor or through ebay.

Therefore, because of its outdated technology, slow printing speed, and rather poor printing capability, I must give a not recommended rating to the HP Laserjet 4 printer. It may have been great in its prime (at least to the users at that time), but personally, I would rather use a typewriter than to torture myself with this horrible printer.

Specifications of the HP LaserJet 4 Printer
600 DPI
8 pages per minute
HP Jet Direct Card (optional)
Black and White printing
2 MB RAM possibly upgraded to 6 or 8 MB
Manual Tray and One Standa