HP Laserjet Pro M15W
Meet the world’s smallest budget laser printer.
The HP LaserJet Pro M15w is aimed squarely at the booming micro economy and the legions of workers whose home is also their office, because HP’s latest laserjet is not only the smallest in its class, but the cheapest too.
The M15w may be a very basic print-only monochrome printer with just one input tray that will only take A4 and a few smaller paper sizes. You won’t find fancy features like duplex printing here and if you require a flatbed scanner, then you should wait for the similarly styled HP LaserJet Pro MFP 28w.
What the M15w offers is a fast printing (19ppm), with the economy and consistency associated with laserjet technology, in a compact unit that takes up little more desk area than a sheet of A4. And while there are few features on board (there’s not even an LCD display) it is equipped with Wi-Fi and is supported by an excellent smartphone app, which makes installation easy and adds functionality such as scanning and printing from the cloud.
The enticing price of $119 includes a toner cartridge, which alone costs $80, so your on-going print cost works out to be low.
HP has designed the LaserJet Pro M15w for the micro home office and who would begrudge such an unobtrusive printer on their desk at home? The two trays fold away neatly, so that the footprint is only a little larger than a sheet of A4, and it stands no taller than the average smartphone.
There’s no LCD display and only three buttons, which didn’t prove to be a disadvantage. It makes no noise at all in standby mode, so this printer won’t distract you while you’re working. Actual printing it is rather noisy, but it prints quickly, so it won’t annoy you for long.
To keep the size and cost of the HP LaserJet Pro M15w to a minimum, the feature-set is also somewhat minimised. There’s only room for one paper tray, for example, and that’s limited to 150 sheets of A4, or A5 paper, or ten DL, or C4 envelopes. Other sizes can’t be fed inside.
Thanks to a slick smartphone app, the HP LaserJet Pro M15w is probably the easiest to install, of any printer we have tested. Just turn the printer on and the app will locate its Wi-Fi signal and get it to join your network. Alternatively, you can connect via Wi-Fi Direct, or the USB cable.
The HP LaserJet Pro M15w printed promptly and reliably throughout the test and churned out pages at least as fast as its quoted 19ppm, if not faster. A4 and A5 paper passes though so quickly that it’s almost a surprise to see anything printed on it at all. Only DL envelopes seemed to slow it down, because they only just fit in the tray and rub the sides on the way through.
The shoebox-sized HP LaserJet Pro M15w can print a thousand documents consistently and quickly on a single toner cartridge and costs less than many of its inkjet rivals.
“What the M15w offers is a fast printing (19ppm), with the economy and consistency associated with laserjet technology, in a compact unit that takes up little more desk area than a sheet of A4.”