Up to two additional 500-sheet cassettes can be purchased to fit onto the base, at £95 each, making a maximum potential paper capacity of 1,600 sheets. The output tray, moulded into the top of the printer, can hold 250 sheets before needing to be emptied.
Replacing the combined toner cartridge and drum is done in seconds
A control pad of buttons and a four-line, backlit LCD status screen are located on the top surface of the unit, towards the front-right corner. Oh how we love HP printer menus. OK, that’s probably a bit sad, but no other manufacturer makes on-printer controls so quick and easy and intuitive to use.
This is especially helpful since the P3015d is designed to allow stored jobs and proof-and-hold functions. In other words, you can send a print job and have the P3015d store it for reprinting directly from the unit at any future date, or have the printer wait until you get to the device before it outputs the job. These can be PIN-protected for security and multi-user personal use. So having an easy-to-use menu system for retrieving these stored and delayed print jobs really makes the feature usable in real-world office environments, rather than just clever.
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, loading special paper stock and so on. Show some foresight print this out in advance and it could potentially reduce the number of unnecessary IT support call-outs for simple tasks, especially paper jams.
A USB port is provided at the front of the unit to let you print documents directly from USB storage devices. Unfortunately, it only lets you print PDF, PS (PostScript) and PCL formats. Support for a wider range of business formats would have been helpful. If not Microsoft Office, then at least open formats such as ODF. Image formats are not supported, either.
A USB port at the front enables printing of PDF files directly from USB storage devices
Talking of USB, the P3015d is provided with a USB connector at the rear, for hooking up to a host device, but no Ethernet port. While the USB option may still be suitable in a number of office setups, the lack of Ethernet feels wrong in a workgroup printer. Sure, there is an Ethernet option in the series, and there is a wireless upgrade option available too, but, in this day and age, every office printer ought to be networkable out of the box.
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.
