HP - Like a rock!

This printer was a surprise delivery from our head office. The first thing you notice is the size of the box it comes in. Well, it's almost a crate, really. But it is made out of cardboard so I guess you'd call it a box. Either way, you'll want to have this beast delivered to your office as I'm sure it won't fit in most cars.

It is big, especially with the 11x17 trays sticking out the back for a total depth of about 24". You'll want to have some space set aside for it.

After using it for several months, the people in our office don't know how they got along without it. It churns out 16 pages per minute (letter size) without any trouble. In fact, it has been almost jam free, only one paper jam for me through 100,000 pages. And that was because somebody didn't load the paper correctly. I wish they would make cars this reliable!

A toner cartridge is standard HP fare; the toner and drum in one cartridge. But a toner cartridge lasts about 10,000 pages so even in a heavy use environment, you won't be stopping to change cartridges very often.

Print quality is excellent. In our engineering office, we can plot scaled down plans that are ordinarily 3 feet wide and 4 feet high on a 11x17 sheet. These scaled down plots are readable, save for the finest details. This is much faster than printing on a large format inkjet plotter, and saves paper, too. Printing black and white photos is a joy, they are crisp and reproduce the finest detail.

There are dual paper trays that came with our model, the standard tray holds about 200 sheets. The optional paper tray holds 500 sheets - an entire ream of paper! And the way this printer goes through paper at 16 pages per minute, you'll need the capacity. Both trays are totally customizable to just about any paper size you can dream of, up to 11X17 and a little bit more. But the way the paper trays are set up, they must both be installed or the printer can't take any paper from a tray. Not a big deal, however. The reason: the trays are stackable underneath the printer. Very clever indeed.

An interesting feature of the paper trays is the ability to set a mechanical indicator on the front of the tray to show what paper size is in that tray. The printer can then use that setting to select the right paper from the trays. So there are no issues about printing on the wrong sheet. As long as your drivers are configured properly, you won't have to mess with the printer much.

The output bin is very generous, I would say it could hold 300 pages quite easily. First page out time is very quick for Word documents and AutoCAD drawings. Most times my document is printed by the time I walk over to the printer. Only the most complex documents take a while to process. With 16MB of standard RAM, it never runs out of memory or complains about lost data.

The HP5000N comes with a standard Ethernet interface. So you can plug it directly into your ethernet network without tying up a workstation. Configuring our Novell Netware network to use the printer was easy, although a network admin would have to do the initial configuration. Parallel connection is provided, but we haven't had a need to use it.

Other options available on this printer include additional paper trays, a duplexer that lets you print on both sides of the page, more RAM of course, and a hard disk drive for those times when the printer can't print fast enough for your office. (which isn't very often)

There is one tiny drawback with this printer however, and you have to read deep into the user manual to find it. According to the user manual, when the printer reaches every 150,000 pages printed, (an 11X17 sheet counts as two pages), the printer will shut itself down and will not print any more pages until you call an HP authorized repairman to do an overhaul on it. And expect the bill for the service to be in the hundreds of dollars as some components need to be replaced during this work. Call it job security for HP's service crew.

The only thing that could possibly make this printer any better is the ability to print colour. And I understand HP makes one of those, too!