HP Color LaserJet Pro M177fw review: Great output, but little else

HP Color LaserJet Pro MFP M177fw $350.00 This color laser multifunction printer offers the usual compromises for this bargain price range: slow performance, minimal features, and high toner costs. If you don't print much then you might not mind...

HP makes some very capable, feature-rich color laser multifunction printers. The HP Color LaserJet Pro M177fw isn't one of them. It actually has impressive output quality, however, its low purchase price brings compromises in speed, features, and toner costs. Unless you print very little, you will come to spend far more on this product than you'd probably like. 

The M177fw may be attached via USB, 10/100 Ethernet, or Wi-Fi. Setup was easy in my hands-on and the driver dialog is nicely laid out with the ability to create shortcuts for your most often used settings. The HTML management pages for checking on the printer across the network were also easy to use. HP provides capable software for all the MFP basics, as well as the now-usual array of remote and Internet printing options.

The M177fw has a 3-inch touchscreen display that makes it easy to operate. Paper capacity is limited (though in line with the low-volume, 250- to 950-page recommended monthly usage for this product). There's a 150-page, open-faced input tray, a 50-page output tray, and a 35-page automatic document feeder (which was very noisy on our test unit). There's no automatic duplex copying, printing, or scanning. HP provides assistance for manual-duplex printing, but none for two-sided scanning or copying.

The scanner lid doesn't telescope, even slightly. Even most non-telescoping lids have slight give in their hinges, but the M177fw's lid canted upward even when scanning a mere 100-page magazine.

The M177fw's overall output quality is a highlight. Photos are rendered exceptionally well for a laser printer, with little graininess and a cool, but still attractive palette. Text and monochrome graphics are equally outstanding—sharp and black. An econo-mode which saves a lot of toner, but still produces legible text. When you see the toner costs, you'll see the need for it.

The M177fw has the slower performance that's typical of low-cost color lasers. Text and monochrome pages exit at 9.9 pages per minute on the PC, and 7.7 pages per minute on the Mac. Snapshot-sized, 4-inch by 6-inch photos print at just under 2 per minute to plain paper, and 1.5 per minute to glossy laser stock. A full-page photo exits in about 55 seconds. Copies proceed at about 4 per minute, and scans speeds are equally acceptable.

With most office printers, higher-capacity cartridges can save you money. Not so with the M177fw. The only available supplies are the $55, 1300-page black and $58, 1000-page 130A series, forcing you to live with 4.2-cent black pages, and 21.6-cent four-color pages. The latter is a real ouch. The M177fw ships with 500-page starter cartridges, so you'll be feeling the pinch sooner, too.

By way of comparison, $500 color laser MFPs usually offer black pages for under 3 cents and four-color pages for under 15 cents with high-capacity supplies. Business-class Inkjet MFPs using high-capacity supplies—and costing about the same as the M177fw—run you less than 2 cents per page for black, and 7 cents per page for color.

The cartridges are mounted on a carousel inside the printer. To access a cartridge, you press an icon of the cartridge in the supplies menu on the control panel. It would be fun to watch, but unfortunately the hatch has to be closed while rotating.

There's no disparaging the LaserJet Pro M177fw's output—it's top notch. But as with all color-laser products at this price point, the toner is too expensive, and the features are just adequate. We suggest you start at the $500 level if you really want a color laser MFP. The toner will still be expensive, but at least there will be duplexing and more capacity.

If you're truly stuck shopping at the $300 level, a  business-class inkjet MFP is the better option, offering better speed, features, and output quality. 

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Review: HP LaserJet Pro 200 color Printer M251nw

Low-cost color lasers like the $329 (as of 03/20/2013) HP LaserJet Pro 200 color Printer M251nw are tempting for small-office users who see laser technology as familiar and reliable (never mind that in this price range, a small-office inkjet is a much better deal). Unfortunately, color laser models in this price range tend to be slow and sparsely featured, with expensive toner. The M251nw sticks to that trend, but it also offers some innovative features and better-than-usual image quality. Still not cheap enough for you? The Dell c1660w has an even lower price tag and even better output quality, but it's a lot slower and has pricier toner.

On looks alone, the M251nw could win a lot of fans. With a faux brushed-black-metal exterior (it's plastic, but convincing), and a flip-up, 3.5-inch touchscreen control panel, it's one of the handsomest small office laser printers to come down the pike in a while.

The M251nw features all of the three major connection technologies: Wi-Fi, Ethernet, and USB. We installed using Wi-Fi with minimum fuss. There's both Wi-Fi Protected Setup and the standard setup wizard. HP’s ePrint cloud-printing services are another bonus, including features like remote printing via e-mail and access to Web-based apps and services.

Paper handling features consist of a 150-sheet paper tray on the bottom of the unit, and an integrated 125-sheet output bin on the top--the classic small laser setup. Duplexing is manual, with step-by-step, onscreen prompts.

The cost per page for consumables with the M251nw is unfortunately quite high, even compared to most entry-level inkjets. The standard 1600-page black cartridge costs $67, for a per-page cost of about 4.2 cents. The cyan, magenta, and yellow cartridges last for 1800 pages and cost $85 apiece (4.7 cents per color, per page), so add 14.1 cents for them. A total of 18.1 cents per four-color page is not a bargain. You can reduce that slightly with the 2400-page, $86 XL black cartridge to 3.6 cents per black page and 17.5 cents per four-color page. There are no high-yield color toners. The printer ships with 700-page, starter-size supplies of all four colors.

Its pages may cost a lot, but the M251nw will give your SOHO correspondence a more professional look than an inkjet. Text is super-sharp, and monochrome graphics are smooth and even. Color graphics are also very good for a laser, though slightly on the cool and dark side. There were noticeable defects in the more difficult areas of our brightly lit group photo, mostly in dark patterns and faces. Non-human subjects generally looked quite nice.

The M251nw printed text and mixed-text and monochrome graphics pages at an aggregate 9.2 pages per minute (ppm) on the PC and 8.6 on the Mac. That's decently fast considering the unit's small volume design and low price. It was fast with 4-by-6-inch snapshots, printing them to plain paper in 20 seconds (3 ppm) and glossy paper in about double the time. A full-page photo printed on the Mac took 70 seconds, or 0.8 pages per minute.

The M251nw carries a one-year warranty and is recommended for light-volume use of 250 to 1500 pages a month. That's a real-life rating, not the fantastic duty-cycle numbers that vendors often provide. We'd love to steer you to a version of this printer that has automatic duplexing, but you seemingly can't get that until you shop the LaserJet Pro 400 models.

Expensive toner and the lack of two-sided printing are typical deficiencies among low-priced color laser printers. While they can add to the cost of ownership, our tests with inkjets show that light-volume users may not feel the ink or toner pinch for some time. Given all that, the HP LaserJet Pro 200 color Printer M251nw is one of the best choices in its class, because of its good output quality, connectivity, and ease of use.

Jon L. Jacobi has worked with computers since you flipped switches and punched cards to program them. He studied music at Julliard, and now he power mods his car for kicks.
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The daughter of a mechanical engineer, Melissa grew up playing with machine parts and still loves getting into the nuts and bolts of how things work. She is never happier than when she is on a factory tour.
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HP LaserJet Pro 400 Color Printer M451dn Review: Great Output, Pricey Toner

The $500 (as of April 2, 2012) HP LaserJet Pro 400 M451dn color laser printer produces extremely nice output--including photos--and is very speedy for a model in this price range. It also has an automatic duplexer, a feature missing from the $450 LaserJet Pro 400 M451nw that we recently reviewed. It sounds great--until you examine the toner costs, which are steep for a relatively high-volume printer.

The controls on the M451dn are minimal but adequate. A two-way rocker button lets you navigate the two-line LED; the panel also has a warning light, along with the usual OK, cancel, and back buttons. Software installation is easy via either USB or ethernet, and the printer dialog procedure is well thought-out.

Paper-handling features include a 250-sheet bottom main tray, an automatic duplexer, a 150-sheet output tray, and an optional ($143) bottom-mounted, 250-sheet auxiliary paper feeder. With a monthly duty cycle of 40,000 pages and a recommended actual monthly print volume of up to 2000 pages, the M451dn can handle a fair amount of printing.

In terms of access, the M451dn is extremely well designed. From the front you can fold out a small part of the panel to reveal the 50-sheet front multipurpose tray, or you can move a larger part of the panel to access the paper path and the slide-out toner tray. A pop-off panel on the right side of the printer makes it easy to upgrade the standard 128MB of memory to 384MB. Note: As of this writing, HP's website sells a 256MB DDR2 DIMM memory upgrade for $599. That exorbitant price comes with HP’s guarantee that the memory will work in the printer, but third-party memory is available for less than $30.

That brings me to the Achilles' heel of this printer: toner costs. The standard black toner cartridge costs $79 and lasts 2200 pages, or 3.6 cents per page. A high-yield black cartridge, available for $102, lasts for 4000 pages, reducing black costs to 2.5 cents per page. The costs are a little higher than average compared with those of other color lasers we’ve tested--and incidentally, some business inkjets have significantly cheaper consumables.

HP offers no high-yield option for the M451dn's cyan, magenta, and yellow cartridges, so if you print a lot of color pages, this is not the printer for you. The standard sizes cost $114 each and last for 2600 pages, working out to just under 4.4 cents per page per color. Next to other standard-size cartridges, these costs are a little cheaper than average, but compared with high-yield toners, they are far more expensive than average. The starter-size cartridges that ship with the printer last approximately 1400 pages.

If you can hack the toner costs, the output of the M451dn is impressive and arrives quickly. Text is dark and sharp, and color photos are very good for a color laser at this price. Our full-page test photo showed a cool color palette and nice details. Text pages rendered at 11.4 pages per minute on the PC and 11.0 ppm on the Mac. Normal-size photos printed at 3.2 ppm to plain paper and 1.5 ppm on glossy paper. Full-page photos printed at about 0.8 ppm.

Output quality and speed are the HP LaserJet Pro 400 Color Printer M451dn's strong suits. If you need the Wi-Fi connectivity that it lacks, its otherwise identical cousin, the M451dw, is only $50 more, at $550. However, if you print in any sort of volume, the ongoing costs for any model in the M451 product line will hurt you eventually--especially if you print lots of color. Alternatives in this price range include the Dell 2150cdn and Brother HL-4570CDW; the latter's high-yield supplies are much less expensive than the M451dn's.

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HP LaserJet Pro 400 Color M451nw Review: Nice Laser Printer Is Duplex-Deprived

The $450 (as of March 9, 2012) HP LaserJet Pro 400 Color M451nw color laser printer has nice output and is relatively speedy considering the price. However, it suffers from the same pricey toner of most entry-level color laser printers, and it lacks the automatic duplexing found in HP's slightly more expensive 'dn' and 'dw' variants.

Our test M451nw was decently constructed. You can easily access the slide-out toner tray and paper path through a fold-down front panel. A pop-off panel on the right side makes it simple to upgrade the unit's standard 128MB of memory to 384MB. The one slightly bothersome component is the bottom-mounted, letter/legal standard paper tray. The tray itself is sturdy enough, but the latch holding it inside the printer offers barely any resistance. HP says it designed the tray to be easy to open, but instead the company managed to make it feel insecure.

The M451nw's controls are adequate for what is really a simple device. You get a two-way rocker button for navigating the two-line LED. That's fine for general operation, but not for manual Wi-Fi setup: You need to attach the printer via USB or ethernet to set up the wireless, unless your router offers WPS (Wi-Fi Protected Setup).

Paper-handling features are sufficient for a small office or workgroup--if the users aren't too far from the printer. Otherwise, this model's lack of an automatic duplexer will wear on those who must constantly run to the printer to reinsert documents for two-sided printing. The 250-sheet input tray, 50-sheet multipurpose tray, and 150-sheet output tray are satisfactory given the unit's roughly 2000-sheet recommended monthly cycle. If not, a bottom-mounted, $143, 250-sheet auxiliary paper feeder is available.

Compared with similarly priced color laser printers, the M451nw's per-page costs are decent. Next to business inkjet printers or inkjet MFPs in the same price range, however, they're exorbitant. The standard black toner cartridge costs $79 and lasts 2200 pages, or 3.6 cents per page. The cyan, magenta, and yellow cartridges cost $114 and last for 2600 pages, or 4.4 cents per page per color. That makes a four-color page cost 16.7 cents, a hair below the average for color lasers. A high-yield black cartridge available for $102 lasts for 4000 pages, reducing black costs to 2.5 cents per page and four-color to 15.6 cents per page. The cartridges that ship with the unit last approximately 1400 pages.

The text the M451nw produces is outstanding--dark and sharp. Color photos are also quite good for a color laser at this price point, though as with most HP printers, human faces have an orange cast. Our full-page photo showed a cool color palette, and nice rendering of fine details.

The M451nw offers an economy mode to save toner. Output in this mode is legible, but only just. If you're going to spend any time perusing the document, or if it's for public consumption, you'll want to print at regular quality.

The HP LaserJet Pro 400 Color M451nw's lack of an automatic duplexer is an issue that you can overcome by opting for the $500 M451dn (no Wi-Fi) or the $550 M451dw (with Wi-Fi and, despite the absence of the letter n in the name, ethernet). Alas, neither of those models can solve the problem of high per-page costs. Consider a high-end business inkjet MFP instead, which could save you a bundle on supplies over time. Alternative lasers in this price range include the Dell 2150cdn and the Brother HL-4570CDW.

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