HP 3015d mono laser
Fast, reliable but expensive
Review In a printing market awash with colour products, here comes HP with an A4 black-and-white business laser. But far from seeming dull, the LaserJet P3015d serves to remind us of how good HP lasers are – and how much better they can be than much of the flashier competition.
Quality performance: HP’s 3015d mono laser printer
Compact in its plain casing, but not particularly small at 316x400x448mm, this 15.9kg printer is well-built and designed to withstand plenty of use. It might look boring but the absence of detail and irregular mouldings should make it easier to find a home for in a cramped office. Thankfully, HP also designed the case to incorporate a pair of cut-ins on either side of the base to make the printer safer to pick up and carry.
The ‘d’ in the product name indicates that this model supports automatic double-sided (duplex) printing. A 500-sheet paper cassette slots into the front of the unit at the base. The entire cassette fits flush with the main body of the printer: nothing sticks out the back. A paper level indicator at the front warns you when to add more stock.
The front of the case, above the paper cassette, folds down to form a multipurpose input tray with a capacity of 100 sheets. Inevitably, this tray needs to be extended with a combination of hinged and telescopic flaps, which are, altogether, more fragile than the rest of the machine.
We would advise users to fold these back up and close the tray when it is not being used, if only to prevent damage by co-workers breaking the flaps off if they carelessly brush against the unit when walking by. Unlikely though it sounds, we have seen and personally experienced this kind of moronic damage in offices many times.
The numeric keypad adds options for navigating the brilliantly intuitive menus
The 500-sheet standard capacity of the main paper cassette caught our attention straight away, since the standard input capacity in most other printers usually starts at 250 sheets. That’s fine for home use but runs out much too quickly at work. The P3015d therefore effectively doubles the input capacity of what the market considers the norm.
COMMENTS
"No Ethernet" is not a serious complaint
Alistair - I think that you have completely missed the boat with the "No Ethernet" complaint. There are three base models in the 3015d series, and you manage to review the ONLY ONE that doesn't have an Ethernet port.
Not every business situation warrants having an Ethernet port in the printer, and I have deployed quite a few workgroup printers in the past couple of years that attached to the network wirelessly (and in HP's case, wirelessly means attaching a EW2400 via the USB port that you also questioned)
While I do admit that the price is a bit on the high side, if the application is on-demand printing of prepared forms and documents it can be less expensive in both dollars and floor space to deploy one of these than a less expensive printer AND a companion computer to hold the forms. It's not a large market - but it is a market that that is addressed with this printer.
@Chris Cartledge on Electricity Consumption
You might want to consider that a company does not spend this much money on a printer with a maximum duty cycle of 100,000 pages per month for it to sit in power save mode all day. Typically, the printer will either be actively printing or in standby waiting for the next print job - and it is going to be less than 30 minutes before the next print job. Given that the average business that uses this type of printer is open more than 15 hours a day, your assumption that the printer will spend the majority of time in sleep mode might need some reconsideration.
Help files
"HP has also stored a set of illustrated Help documents in the printer, so you can quickly print out step-by-step instructions on clearing paper jams, ..." Printing out instructions for clearing paper jams? Really? Probably quite useful if you have *two* printers of the same model side-by-side...
Not as bad as
a Lexmark C530dn where it is actually cheaper to replace the entire printer which includes 1.5K starter cartridiges, rather than buy a complete set of replacement 1.5K recycled cartridges!
Electricity Consumption
According to HP, this printer goes into sleep mode when the product has been inactive for 30 minutes, so a typical printer will spend most of the time in this mode. Sadly HP specifies no sleep mode power consumption - only : 780 watts (active), 14.5 watts (standy), 8.5 watts (powersave), 0.6 watts (off). Taking sleep and powersave to be the same, the printer will cost £8.50 per year at typical UK prices, just to be plugged in without any printing.. HP specifies typical electricity consumption at 3.267 kWh/Week which costs £20 per year.
