My Baby Laser Printer

I have had this printer for about two weeks, and so far it has performed flawlessly. I previously used other HP LaserJet printers at work and have been sold by HP's quality and reliability. I researched other brands around this price range, but I as I mentioned I decided to go with HP because of my favorable experience with their laser printers.

The HP LaserJet 1020 is a very basic laser printer; there are no buttons to press nor any LCD screen on the outside. I actually like its simplicity. It features a 150 sheet paper tray, and a manual feed paper tray. The paper tray accepts letter, legal, and smaller sizes. The manual feed tray is where you would normally load your envelopes. I find the 150 sheet paper tray is more than enough for the amount of printing I do at home. The output paper tray on top can extend as well as collapse and fold away for storage. Same goes for the regular 150 sheet paper tray.

I like the look of this printer, smooth curves and it comes in a very attractive grey duotone. It has a small footprint and easily fits on a corner of my desk in the bedroom next to my laptop. The build quality is nice, solid as far as the feel and finish. I like the fact that the toner cartridge also contains the printing mechanism. This means the printer will last a long time. You only need to replace the toner, which doesn't cost that much and is widely available at many office supply store. I should also mention that the printer is fairly light, so it is easy to move from room to room if you decide to do so.

Out of the box the printer comes with a power cord, installation CD, Getting Started Guide, and a full capacity black toner cartridge, but no USB 2.0 printer cable (sold separately). I knew this ahead of time and went out and purchased a cable for $20.

The printer software was a cinch to install. I have Windows XP Home edition, and it took me about 5 minutes to get everything set up and print my first page. I have to say the printouts are outstanding for such an economically priced laser printer! I have used other laser printers at work, some costing 10 times as much, and I would be hard pressed to find any difference between the quality of the printouts. I normally use the EconoMode which is a step down from the best 600 dpi print quality, but this saves toner. In this mode the printouts are still crisp and black, and it suits most of my normal printing needs. One thing I especially found to be a pleasant surprise to use is the manual duplexing. Although I still have to flip the pages by hand, the procedure is very simple and the onscreen popup is helpful. Basically the printer prints all the pages on one side, and then it will tell you to reinsert the printed pages. You then click "continue" on the onscreen popup window and it finishes printing the other side of the pages.

The speed of the HP 1020 is rated at about 15 pages per minute. This seems to be about right. I find that the rating for memory is a little low at 2 MB, however don't trust specs alone since this printer zips through documents with ease. The printer is quiet when it prints, and I like the fact that it is absolutely silent in standby. As I said above, the text printouts are exceptional, however, if you were to print images like from a webpage it is good, but not great. For those who print lots of graphics and want realistic looking images, try looking into an inkjet printer.

There isn't that much I can criticize about this printer. If I was to be picky I would say that the manual tray needs to hold the paper better. I have had several instances where I didn't position the paper exactly perfect and the printouts came out slightly crooked. It might help if there was a full-length tray for the paper instead of the half-length tray that it has now. Just make sure you if you do use the manual feed tray that your paper is aligned straight (using the blue plastic guides) and push your paper as far in as it will go.

Overall, I highly recommend this printer for the home, small office, and especially for college students who need to print out lots of articles.