HP LaserJet Pro MFP 4301 Review – How a colour printer helped me produce a magazine from scratch!

When I came up with the hairbrain idea of publishing an EFTM Magazine last year I put a lot of thought into how to distribute it, finding an actual printing press to produce 15,000 of them, but then it hit me – I’ve gotta design this thing! And I knew the inkjet printer in the office was not going to do the job I needed, so HP offered up the HP LaserJet Pro MFP 4301 for review!

The way I saw it, I could do any design I wanted on a computer screen, but to actually sit back and proof read it, even to get a sense of the flow, I needed to print out the pages.

And for a 50+ page magazine that was not going to be a quick process on an InkJet, and you know how ink printed pages have that wet then crinkled dry feeling to them? I wanted to staple these like a book and because of the full gloss full colour nature of the design – I knew it would take a lot of colour.

So I wanted to try laser printing.

Out of the box this device was a breeze to setup, jumped straight onto the WiFi network and we were running – from any device.

This printer will set you back about $649, and knowing how much I was going to print and worried I’d run low on toner in the middle of an important design moment, I also purchased a pack of replacement toner – which cost about the same amount. Colour toner cartridges aren’t cheap, and that’s the real consideration here because using this at home for kids is a big no-no, you’re better off on subscription or ink-tank in my opinion.

But in a small business environment, having those cartridges on the shelf and ready – good to go.

As it turns out, I didn’t run through the colour. Only one cartridge is currently even showing as low – and that’s after some 587 full colour printed pages!

My only gripe has been that as an “office” printer it’s frustrating that it slips into power saving mode or drops off the network or something every single day after I’ve not used it a while. I changed all the power settings and nothing. I’m going to try hooking up Ethernet to see if there’s a bit of a Wake on Lan that’s possible there. It’s really not a big deal to press the power button off then let it reboot frankly.

Quality was exceptional. Frankly, given the lower quality paper I used in the magazine, my test prints looked better than the real thing:)

But – It was just so great. Printing 52 high quality full colour PDF pages over and over again as I iterated my design over a couple of weeks.

Of course, it’s also great for printing out scripts and other things, and it does it so fast too!

Up top is a scanner that’s there when you need those documents digitised and there’s a host of cloud services too like print from anywhere and local network settings like scan to network folder.

This printer would I think – be ideal for a small business with 1-10 staff, doing all the work you need when you need it.

Web: HP