HP Laserjet CP1215 toner cartridges

The HP CP1215 laser printer uses four seperate colour toner cartridges, the black cartridge CB540a has a capacity of 2,200 pages and the colour cartridges CB541a/CB542a and CB543a are rated at 1,400 pages.Cartridge Concept offer all of these toner cartridges at discount prices with next day delivery. now also offer compatible cartridges for this printer.

HP Color LaserJet CP1215 Review

The amount of colour laser printers below £150 is growing and HP's Colour LaserJet CP1215 is an extremely small entry to the current market. It isn't significantly bigger than a mono laser, yet can print in full-blown colour at rates of speed comparable inkjet machines would likely even now be hard pressed to match.

It is a nice little printer, cased in light grey and white, with a simple control panel consisting of two substantial buttons, for paper feed and job cancel, as well as a range of indicator lights, including four for toner level. Paper feeds from the 150-sheet tray at the bottom of the machine to an indent in the top cover and there aren't any opportunities to include extra trays to improve the capacity and flexibility of paper handling.

At the back is a single USB socket for data transfer and again HP mentions no wireless option.

The colour laser engine is a nice, small design. Fold down the front panel then pull out the tray to get into the four HP Color LaserJet CP1215 printer toner cartridges, these each consist of both drum and also toner. The starter cartridges provided with the machine have capacities of 750 pages each, therefore you'll need to get supplies promptly in the event that you're use is just about anything besides light printing.

Software installation went smoothly, with drivers for all those versions of Windows following 2000 readily available on the CD as well as linux drivers readily available for download. There are not any OSX drivers available for this device, either on the software CD or on the support site, and that is strange, because practically all other HP printers offer support.

HP boasts print speeds of 16ppm black as well as 12ppm colour for the Colour LaserJet CP1215, however as is common they are a little ambitious. We scored 6.12ppm for our five-page black text print, however this went up to 9.45ppm on the 20-page test document. The five-page black text and colour graphics print generated 4.76ppm, so in both cases we had significantly lower than the advertised rates of speed.

The standard of print with the HP machine is good for the purpose of common office duties, with clear, razor-sharp, black text, right down to very small point sizes. There is no indication of toner spatter while emboldened text in headings come through looking as clear as body copy.

Colour images are vibrant to the point of over-saturation and have a bit of a gloss to them, which some individuals aren't keen on. More problematical is certain tones emerge over-dark, so black text on top is hard to read; a shame as registration of black over colour is usually precise.

Lastly, our test photo print wasn't especially great. Despite the fact that there's very little manifestation of banding and colour gradation is fairly smooth, the main colours are again overly brilliant and darker hues are usually extremely eager to veer to black. The four drum and toner cartridges are the sole consumables for this machine.

As we've observed more and more equivalently priced inkjet printers and all-in-ones are usually coming through with cheaper print prices than a lot of lasers, therefore if print economy is particularly crucial to you, you should think about the new business inkjet models available from HP along with other manufacturers.

There are some good advantages of the Colour LaserJet CP1215, like its compact size, ease of maintenance and excellent text print quality. However, it is also quite slow, provides over-saturated colours and has no Mac support. Plus there is no multi-purpose feed slot. Not one of HP's best designs.