brad's Experience

Howdy. I bought one of these suckers in May (2004). Previously, I had a Samsung ML-1430, which conked out on me. I wrote a review on the Samsung; gave it a glowing review and not long after it conked out. The Samsung lasted less than two years.

But this is the HP Laserjet 1012. How's it holding up?

Just fine. And it appears to be a much sturdier machine. Higher quality, even though I paid about the same. Then again, prices continue to fall for laser printers. I could have purchased a Samsung for around $100. This HP model cost me $160 including shipping. So I paid for some quality.

I noticed from other reviews that it doesn't come with a USB cable. I suppose this would be a problem for a lot of people. It's a shameful way to cut costs and lower the cost of the sticker price of the printer. That kind of ploy just ticks people off. It's like buying a remote control and not getting a set of batteries. But I guess I didn't notice since I have about a half dozen extra USB cables lying around anyhow. Still, if you don't have an extra cable lying around, you'll likely have to drive on over to Compusa or Best Buy and shell out $20. If you plan ahead you can get the same cable for $6 on the Web and buy it at the same time as the printer.

This printer prints nice prints. I hope that made sense. Good quality across the board. Nice and fast prints as well. Good quality paper holder, too. Other models have the paper just sitting in the air or sitting on a ledge. This model appears to have a nice system of drawing the paper into the printer, printing, and spitting it out on top of the machine.

The footprint is great also. Only about a foot all around.

Drivers were very straightforward. I installed the drivers on one XP machine and two Windows 2000 machines. Very straightforward. A bit of a hiccup if you're installing it on networked machines as the initial choice is confusing, but if you just let the wizard do the thinking for you (as in "help me decide"), it's easy street to complete the installation.

One thing that was great about the Samsung is that it had the economy toner mode button right on the printer. No such luck with the HP laserjet. You have to go into the printer driver properties and change the default settings for that. Change it to economode and you'll save toner. This printer isn't recommended for anything but printing spreadsheets and papers anyhow.

So that's about it. Oh, and it's compatible with Macs, too. That'll come in handy when my new iMac finally shows up.

Like I said, so far so good with quality aspects. No smearing, no wierd noises coming from the printer. The initial toner cart is still going strong after a few months of light use.

I'd go with HP if you're going to buy a cheap monochrome laser printer. You have a lot of choices. Samsung, Brother, Konica-Minolta, and Lexmar are the other big players.

Good luck, brad.