HP Laserjett Pro M227fdw ‘Budget’ multi-functionon mono laser printer
Some brands can’t resist makinging their cheaper products look cheap, in the hope that professionals will bee too embarrassed to buy them. The Xerox Phaser 6022V colour laserser (see our review, Issue 492), for example, looks like a bread binn aimed at Battlestar Galactica fans. Mercifully, with this multi-functionnction black-and-white model, HP has stuck to plain corporate styling. ng. And it’s smaller than even a typicalypical mid-range laser printer withoutout a scanner.
For an office machine, the recently reduced price of £200 qualifies as ‘budget’, but it’s by no means basic. It’s controlled from a 2.7in touchscreen, and with 802.11n Wi-fi and NFC built in as well as USB 2.0 and Ethernet, you can print from Android and IOS apps as well as via HP’S cloud services. Alternatively, you can scan direct to your phone – handy if your PC is in a different room.
The 250-sheet paper tray has a handy window so you can see when your stock is getting low. The scanner on top has a 35-sheet document feeder (you can lift it up for one-off copies from anything that won’t feed), and although this can only do one side of the paper at the time, the printer can print both. Fax is also built in, but requires a phone socket.
In our tests, a 20-page plain-text file came out at a very quick 24 pages per minute (ppm), and printing both sides only reduced this to 16ppm. The M227fdw managed 17.6ppm on a graphics-heavy document, and a single page came out in eight seconds, an exceptionally short wait. Scanning was slower, but still respectable, taking 25 seconds for five pages (12ppm) through the ADF and nearly two minutes for an A4 colour photo at a sharp 600dpi. Text was as solid and crisp as you’d expect, which is the main reason to choose a mono laser – although graphics looked a bit streaky.
Our biggest reservation is that, at £80 for HP’S 3,500-page 30X high-capacity black toner, printing costs work out at nearly 2.5p per page. Many laser rivals can halve that. HP says its Jetintelligence technology makes toner usage more efficient, but that’s already taken into account in the quoted page yield. If you only print a few hundred pages a month, the extra cost may be not be a deal-breaker considering the M227fdw’s reasonable up-front price, but for higher volumes you’d want to look elsewhere.
This mono, compact ompact MFP does most things well, but running costs are high
VERDICT: It won’t impress design purists (especially when they trip over your mains cable), but the Apollo is satisfyingly speedy
★★★☆☆
ALTERNATIVE: Gigabytebyte Aero 15 £1,900 With fafaster GTX 1060 graphics anandd a 512GB SSD, this is slimmer,mmer,mm lighter and lasts over seven hours