Compact and reliable laser workhorse

I originally purchased this unit to replace an inkjet multifunction color which worked great but ate ink regardless of whether you used the printer or not. I researched the cost of replacement toner cartridges before I purchased the printer. The C4092A cartridge runs about $57 new with an estimated yield of 2500 pages; effectively 2.3 cents per page.

Printing is crisp and reliable. I’ve never had any problem with smudging or light spots on any type of paper loaded. The printer handles envelopes of various sizes well—just make sure to open the envelope flap immediately to make sure the heat didn’t seal it.

The fax function is straightforward and works perfectly about 95% of the time. On occasion there seems to be a fundamental incompatibility with a fax machine at the other end—usually in this case the laserjet seems to send data too fast for the other machine and the connection is dropped. Sometimes a workaround is to send only a couple pages at a time. At other times, I have to resort to using a different fax machine. I’ve always been able to receive a fax though, even if it took a few tries.

The copy function works very well and makes it very simple to make one or several copies of a page quickly. Even my mom was able to use the machine effectively, and she is normally quite uncomfortable around computer equipment.

The machine appears quite durable overall. I purchased the machine a year and a half ago for home use and have burned through two toner cartridges with my avid web research, financial planning, and other projects. Trying to be frugal, I print on the back side of used paper, which subjects the printer to the occasional abuse of paper jams caused by eating several pages because I forgot a staple or because the paper surfaces were slick. It’s easy to clear paper jams and the laserjet keeps right on ticking.

The laserjet 3200 lacks an on/off button, which will be slightly irksome when a job fails to print and won’t delete from the print queue or when you accidently send a 200 page document to the printer and want to stop printing right away. You’ll have to resort (as I do) to yanking the power cord out of the socket. Effective, but a little bit of a pain.

The scanning function works very well for sheets of standard size. Anything much smaller and you’ll have to have a flatbed as well (I have a dedicated flatbed scanner). The multipage feeder works most of the time, but grabs more than one page often enough to be irritating. I use the parallel interface (there’s an optional USB interface you can buy), and although the scanner is great scanning low-resolution (300 dpi) black & white and reasonable for scanning 300 dpi color, when I try to go to 600 dpi color, the scan is offensively slow (about 10 minutes). Before I re-installed my Windows 2000 operating system, a color scan of 300 dpi or more would result in scan failure. I’ve considered that purchasing the optional USB cable might alleviate the problem; USB can theoretically push a max of 12 Mbps as opposed to the 150 kbps of the parallel interface, and the typical file size of and 8 ½ x 11 mixed image scanned at 300 dpi B&W, 300 dpi color, and 600 dpi color are about 600 kB, 2 MB, and 8 MB respectively.

One oddity about the machine—I could never figure out how to make it print, scan or fax anything in legal size. For normal use, this isn’t an issue, but one those high-pressure occasions when you’re trying to get papers copied so you can close on your low-interest home refinance by 5:00 p.m. this can be pretty aggravating. I’m not a big fan of legal size documents anyhow, so I consider this a minor gripe.