HP LaserJet 1100

The HP LaserJet 1100 is supplied with a mere 2Mb of internal memory as standard. We upgraded ours to have 8Mb. The more memory a printer has the quicker it can handle print data. It also has a 35Mhz Motorola processor.

The printer has a standard resolution of 600 dpi which is a perfectly decent resolution for a printer, especially a laser. It’s capable of 8 pages per minute and our experience is that it actually achieves that too. The printer can be connected using a parallel port or as is more commonly the case with a workgroup, network using the Ethernet adapter.

The paper tray can handle a total of 125 sheets, so while this has network capabilities, it might feel more at home as a single user or SOHO printer. I imagine larger workgroups might end up being a bit much for it after a while, especially with only 8Mb of memory.

We are such SOHO users, so can vouch for its capability as that. There are only three of us on our network and have yet to give the 1100 pause. We aren’t great printers, but there are times, especially when a deadline looms that things get a bit frenetic and we’re all trying to get our individual parts of a project done at once.

Print quality is second to none, even with only 600 dpi to work with. It doesn’t matter so much to a laser than to an inkjet. In our experience, coverage is much more even, precise and quicker than with ink. Photos and images are much better with an inkjet, but seem a bit more expensive to print. Our requirements are predominantly textual, so it matters little to us.

The LaserJet 1100 prints text well, whatever the size. We are journalists so we use standard fonts, MLA formatting and only the odd image, as the editor adds those himself. Test in Times New Roman is pretty standard, you can’t really go wrong with it, but when we print something non-work related, it handles other fonts and points very well indeed.

The HP LaserJet 1100 is a good old workhorse printer. While marketed at a workgroup, I’m not sure its suited to one larger than ours. It works well, prints well and has given us no trouble since we owned it.