9 out of 9 people found this review helpful.
Super fast printer that keeps on going and going...
Date of Review: Mar 27, 2005
The Bottom Line: Overall a fantastic printer for general purpose plain-paper printing, but if you intend printing on varied media then you might want to steer clear of this one.
The most recent printer I have had the pleasure of using is the HP Laserjet 4100DTN, purchased second-hand as an upgrade to replace my previous laser printer.
The most important feature to consider when looking at this machine is the speed: At 25ppm in full 1200dpi quality, this leaves the 4050 predecessors miles behind which could only manage 17ppm. Print quality on this machine is superior: even though this is on only mono you would not believe the quality of photos and graphics. Toner distribution is even and consistant with bold saturation: there are no lines or patches.
HP has built on the success of the 4050 and the 4100 has many similarities both visually and operationally. The control panel is the same with the Menu / Item / Value keys. This can be a little bit tricky to get the hang of to start with but it is generally easy to use. The printer also features the very handy duplexer for automatic double-sided printing. Speed is reduced when duplexing but not as bad some printers: it's still pretty fast. It is however, much noisier, so you can forget having this at the end of someone's desk if your going to be duplexing a lot. They'll be driven mad by the noise!
Paper input on this printer is impressive. The two 500sheet trays along with the multi purpose tray give an input capacity of 1100 sheets. The printer also allows tray chaining so it will pull from another tray when the previous one runs out. This allows longer periods of uninterrupted printing. Thankfully HP has rectified the problem which occurred with the 4050s input tray when using shorter media. On the 4050s the rear paper guides often became unlocked, causing media to fall to the back of the tray giving the message 41.1.3 UNEXPECTED PAPER SIZE. No more on the 4100! There is a strong locking mechanism to keep the paper guide in place: it actually snaps to common paper sizes although custom sizes can be used. The position of the guide tells the printer what size of media is in the tray, so it will pull from the correct tray without you having to tell it which one to use.
Unfortunately the multipurpose tray on this machine isnt great (tray 1). Occasional misfeeds occur which results in more than 1 sheet being pulled through. This can lead to all sorts of problems especially if duplexing. But most of the time you wouldnt be duplexing from tray 1 this is more for envelopes, transparencies etc. This does however let down the machine and this is a problem that seems to run with all of the 4000/4050/4100 models. Hopefully it has been rectified for the 4200, my next planned logical upgrade!
The online help feature of this printer is really good. Whenever a roadblock occurs, the printer displays step-by-step remedial action on the LCD screen. Screen prompts and error messages are clear and informative. Likewise Setting up the printer for the first time is a piece of cake. You just place the printer on top of the lower tray, slide in the duplexer, plug in the network cable, turn it on, and the HP JetDirect installation wizard does the rest of the work for you! This sets it up on your network and even if you don't have the Jet Direct CD you can download it off HP's website.
These are workhorse machines, and well looked after these will go on for years. My university bought a load of these in late 2001 and there still going today, most of them having done over 1 million pages!
