4 out of 4 people found this review helpful.
No hassle workhorse B&W laser printer
Date of Review: Jun 1, 2005
The Bottom Line: If you need a black and white workhorse printer, you should keep your eyes peeled for refurbished models.
Because I was a Mac-holdout, a long time Mac user who was strongly resisting the drive to the PC world, I needed a printer that would work with both operating systems. Bought my HP Laserjet 5MP (stands for Mac/PC) in 1997 and have hardly had to give it a moment's thought since! That's the way I like my essential business support systems to work: hassle-free, without time-consuming tweaking and expensive coddling.
It was pricey to purchase (about $C 1400), and the toner cartridges aren't cheap either (between $C 100 and 120), but I get approximately 5,000 pp/cartridge when printing text using an HP OEM cartridge. Slightly fewer if using refurbished.
The only tweaking needed was when it began choking on large Adobe Acrobat PDF files. I bumped up printer memory (originally 3 MB) to 32 MB (Heck... memory is cheap!) which revved it right up again.
I've heard many colleagues and friends complain about perpetual paper jamming; some of them seem to feel that it's just a fact of life. Well, I would go out of my mind if my printer jammed even once a day! This printer (and its sister styles... the 4MP, 4P, 5P, 6MP, 6P... to name the ones I know of) have a smooth paper feed path from a bottom mounted tray. No jams (unless the paper has a bad corner flaw).
Looks kinda crisp and modern. Like a small Frank Gehry building.
