The Colour LaserJet CP1215 is HP’s latest entry level LaserJet lineup. The price tag on this laser printer cannot be guessed with its looks alone. The CP1215 is one of HP’s most affordable printers in the market. It is a very simple single function colour printer that is designed to be used in a small business environment. Though it turns out to be a great alternative to the costlier HP Colour LaserJet CP2025n with its unobstructed footprint and excellent quality of colour and black and white printer, it has a lot of limitations too. For instance, its incompatibility with any of Mac OS, extremely slow speed and very scarce features.

A reasonably Compact printer:

The CP1215 LaserJet Compact printer from HP possesses a design that is very similar to that of the CP2025n. The printer has got the “Compact” tag with its dimensions of just 10 x 15.7 x 20” (H X W X D) inches. The unit weighs 38.9 pounds which is considerably light weight than most of the laser printers out there in the market. These low values are obtained by omitting the internal auto duplexing and networking hardware.

HP Colour LaserJet CP1215 Printer

Buttons and controls:

It also has a grey and white shades that covers the exterior, but the HP CP1215 Duplex Laser Printer does not have a LCD display. Instead, HP has included a main control panel towards the side of the face plate that contains all the buttons that are required to manipulate and trouble shoot the laser printer. The buttons and lights in the control panel includes paper feed button, power button, ready light, resume light, paper jam light, attention light and an array of status lights that indicate the low toner levels etc. These LED status lights work fine but it would have been much better if HP had just included a two line LCD display. If only they had employed an LCD display, then the display of very specific details on specific trouble shooting and printing job could have been given.

The other parts of the printer are quite simple with just a small power button on the left side and a power plug on the lower rear side of the printer. All of the paper accessing and toner handlings are in the front of the printer in form of several fold out drawers. They are lined in the order of output tray on the top, followed by the toner drawer and an input tray at the end. The input tray has a capacity of 150 sheets.

Installation and set-up of CP1215:

The process of installing the drivers and setting up a connection is very simple and hassle free as this is an USB only printer. For now HP has got no offer of any networking attachment for the printer and so, if you have any idea of networking, then a direct attachment is mandatory. We appreciate HP for providing the basic instructions in a very simple manner. The driver also runs and installation guide automatically that will be of great help for installation purposes.

Driver options:

The driver offers you a few options that allow you to customise a few settings but it is no where near the comprehensive CP2025n. The CP1215 colour Laserjet Printer is in a fixed 600 x 600dpi for both black and colour prints. You are given options to choose between four colour or black neutral greys in order to save ink, yet there is no way that you will be able to adjust the resolution of the prints. The driver options are formatted in such a way that it suites the windows operating system and hence there is no option for the Mac users, which takes out a wide spectrum of users out of the market.

Price reducing strategy:

Now a days, as we had mentioned in some of the other reviews, manufacturers offer a starter set of toner cartridges that are only a fraction of what you get in the shops. This is done in order to strategically keep the prices of the printer low. And the worse is that for most of the consumers, this surprise comes only after purchasing the printer as it is not clearly mentioned in the package itself. And, the Hewlett Packard Colour LaserJet CP1215 is not an exception, all the four toner cartridges, cyan, magenta, yellow and black contain approximately just the half of a standard volume toner.

Quite an expensive operation:

When the price of the prints are roughly calculated, they are slightly expensive than the HP CP2025n. The LaserJet CP1215 has got a monthly duty cycle of 1000 pages, where as, its competition laser has a cycle of 40,000 pages which makes the fact clear that it is suited only for the small office uses.

Awful print speed:

Coming to the part of performance, HP Colour LaserJet CP1215’s speed cannot be well described by any other word than “Pathetic”. It gave around 6ppm for colour graphics, 5 and a half ppm for presentation, 5.36 for colour text and a little more than 8ppm for black text. When put in comparison with the other printers, you will be find that the difference is totally unacceptable, and will get frustrated by waiting for a colour print to appear from the printer.

Excellent quality though:

Though the speed had let you down, the quality of the prints do not do the same. They are excellent with well formed black and colour text. Even the edges are sharp and shading is dense. Though some banding can be witnessed in some of the fine details, majority of the photo elements comes out well with nicely saturated natural colour. Overall, the print quality of HP Colour LaserJet CP1215 Single Function Printer is good for a small office that has occasional presentation to be thrown in but for the larger offices that have heavy photographic works would like to have a quality of print that can be offered only by inkjet printers.

The package contents includes the HP LaserJet CP1215 laser printer, power cable, 750-page cyan, magenta, yellow, and black cartridges, CD with user guide and printer software and a getting started guide.

Warranty and support:

HP offers HP Colour LaserJet CP1215 with one year warranty. In addition to this, HP also offers 24×7 toll free phone support with instant chatting during week days. HP’s website also has a load of other useful tuffs for your printer such as, downloadable drivers, software, manuals, e-mail tech support and even trouble shooting guide.

Verdict:

HP Colour LaserJet CP1215’s pros include the simple design, ease in installation, good quality colour prints, low price tag and support for manual duplexing. Whereas, the cons list extends to expensive operation, incompatibility with Mac OS, very slow print speeds, absence of a LCD display, very small quantity of toners offered and the fixed resolution.
And so, if you are having a system that operates on Mac or in a situation of printing a large number of sheets, look for a better alternative, a cost effective Dell 1320cn which is another laser printer that offers faster colour prints and also a single sheet manual feed slot. Else if you own a small office and not cared about the print speeds, the LaserJet CP1215 is in fact a good choice.

 

HP Color Laserjet CP1215 (CC376A#ABA) Specification Details

Manufacturer HP
Model Name HP Colour LaserJet CP1215 Printer
Printer Type Workgroup colour laser printer
Dimensions 15.7 x 17.8 x 10.0 in
Weight 38.9 lb
Black print speed Up to 12 ppm
Colour print speed Up to 8 ppm
Black print resolution Up to 600 x 600 dpi
Colour print resolution Up to 600 x 600 dpi
Duplex printing Manual
Print technology implemented HP ImageREt 2400
Ultraprecise toner
HP edge-enhancement technologies
Printer memory 16 MB
Processor 264 MHz Custom RISC Processor
Supported paper sizes Letter, legal, executive, envelopes (No 10, Monarch)
Duty cycle 25000
Input tray capacity 150-sheet input tray
Monthly duty cycle 250 to 1000
Networking None
Connections 1 x Hi-Speed USB
Supported operating systems Windows 2000; Windows XP Home; Windows XP Professional;
Windows Server 2003; Certified for Windows Vista(R)
Print languages Host-based
EPA Energy Star Compliant Yes
Warranty 1 year

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