The year is 2015, yet we’re still using printers in our daily lives, but let’s face it, we need them for many uses, particularly their fax functionality.
If printers and all-in-one devices are here to stay, the best we can do is innovate them to be some of the best printers available. Remove physical buttons, give them insane speeds, and offer a design that is stylish for the modern office.
As a world leader in printers, HP has lived off the major success that their printers have brought over the years. They offer some of the best features, have great styling, and most importantly, work flawlessly. In an effort to make that tradition continue, HP recently announced a brand new printer lineup, a mid-sized printer that can handle small business needs by giving them enterprise technology.
Can the Red Dot Design award-winning HP printer replace your office printer?
Welcome to my review of the HP Color LaserJet Pro MFP M277dw printer. During this review, I will be covering the following topics: the design, features, functionality, and my final thoughts. A special thank you to HP for providing this printer.
Design
Beginning with the exterior, the M277dw comes in a new pearl white color that offers an excellent color choice for a modern office, especially when compared to matt black printers.
Up front is the business end of the printer, with the paper out tray resting bellow the digital scanner. To the left is your user interface touchpad to control the printer, followed by a single USB port for direct printing. Shift your attention to the right side and there is the NFC pad and the only physical button on the M277dw, the power button, which can easily be accidently pressed.
Below the chromed HP logo are your two paper trays. Tray 1 is your single feed tray for custom bordered paper, envelopes, or non-standard paper size. To assist with feeding paper, Tray 1 uses two manually sliding guide bars. Underneath that is your 150-sheet, tray 2 paper holder that can accommodate paper sizes from A5 up to A14. Tray 2 is fully removable and also includes helpful engravings to show you the correct sizes for paper and how the guide bars function.
Take a bird’s eye view of the printer and you discover the top mounted paper tray that acts as both a fax machine and multiple page automatic scanner. Ready paper is detected by a small switch that is pressed when paper is inserted all the way, the printer also emits a small sound. Scanned paper is then returned to the holding tray below.
Lift up the fax section to discover the edgeless glass, single page scanner. HP’s design team can be proud of themselves here as the scanning surface is a design statement in of its own. You can see all of the small scanning internals as well as a well-placed HP logo that rests below the glass. To give you a perfect scan, the scanning area uses a bright white back surface as well as a decently strong hinge to keep the surface as flat as possible, but light enough to lift with ease. It should be noted that even with paper in the holding tray above, lifting the scanner head does not cause the paper above to fall out, it stays put.
Along the sides of the printer you will only find two lifting handles whereas the rear contains the product information tags, power in, Ethernet jack, USB connection, and a phone and modem connection port.
In the very rare case that a paper jam arises, the printer can be accessed by popping open either the front or rear covers giving you adequate access to the inside. The ink cartridges are located in the front of the printer and are very easily replaceable when they do eventually run out.
Finally, there’s the overall size of the printer. HP optimized this printer for a small business office to handle moderate usage throughout the day. Because of the lower user volume, HP had the opportunity to make the smallest printer in its class and it really is small! Users can easily place this on a desk or shelf and not have to worry about an overwhelming printer.
Features
When deciding on a title for a review, I tend to choose a clever saying that gives you a heads up on one of the best features of the product in the spotlight. When taking a moment to think of a title for the M277dw, there’s a lot of different attributes I could have chosen, but the speed of this printer is unmatched and is certainly its best feature.
I set the printer up on a wireless connection and rested it about five feet away from my desk. While in sleep mode, I issued a print command to print a full sized photo on standard paper. By the time I could get up and walk over to the printer, it had nearly finished the first photo. HP engineers developed a printer that is one of the fastest in its class. The M277dw can finish your first page in just 12 seconds while other printers can take 23. Plus, the speed doesn’t stop with the first page, it continues to the second page, and the third, and the fourth, and so on. As I will speak more about later on, I was able to print five pages in incredible speeds.
You’re not just limited to printing via your computer with the M277dw. With the M277dw, users have the ability to print via their phone or USB flash drive. Beginning with the USB drive, simply connect it to the single USB port on the front and you have the ability to print Word and PowerPoint documents. Before printing, you have the power to see the document on the touch display to ensure that it is the correct document; this is the only printer in its class to support this print preview. Moreover, by enabling the NFC radio on your phone, you can tap to print an open document; this gets even easier with Office for Mobile. But wait, it gets better…
You don’t have to be in the office to print to the M277dw. By utilizing HP servers and their newest creation, JetAdvantage, you can send your print document to a secure server and have HP send the document to your connected printer, the document will be awaiting your arrival.
Being a business printer, the M277dw is bound to include the benefits of business technology and it begins with print protection. A printer is a major weakness when it comes to security, as they typically lack protection from network hacks or can be victim to the consequences of storing important documents on an internal hard drive. For network protection, the M277dw uses a WPA2 connection for wireless data transfer and uses a firewall for additional threat control. With this HP product, it offers JetAdvantage to allow users private printing server and they also offer JetIntelligence, a built-in safeguard that protects you against counterfeit toner cartridges. Toner is expensive and you should always make sure you get what you pay for.
Speaking of toner, three color cartridges are provided (Yellow, Magenta, and Cyan) which create the 16 million colors that are possible and there is a single black cartridge. You can expect to print around 2800 pages on the black cartridge, while the color can last up until 2300 pages and costs $100 with black being $90 respectively.
Finally, there is the touch screen user interface display. Since the beginning of my HP printer reviews, HP has transitioned into this little functional touch display to take care of all of the printing needs. Fonts and menus are easily read and navigated through with the interface also being snappy and quick. IT teams will enjoy the settings menu with the possibility to print many reports while the average user will enjoy the simplicity. If you’ve used an HP touch display before, you’ll feel right at home with this one.
Functionality
As with any printer, you first need to install Windows drivers to send it print commands. Typically for my review units, I install the printers via Windows “Add a Printer”, but with this printer an HP driver is necessary. I was expecting to be bombard by additional HP content when installing the driver, but to my surprise, only the driver was installed and printing to PCL 6 sent the printing commands flawlessly.
The M277dw is an all-in-one device that can handle scans, faxes and prints. No matter what office you have, you should have no troubles printing custom paper or sending an important document to a client. Even though this is an all-in-one device, what it really shines in, is printing documents.
Over the past month, I’ve been using the printer for my daily print jobs and so far, I have printed 675 documents with ten scan jobs. It should be noted that ~500 of those printed pages were all done within the same day, back-to-back. Not only did the printer continue its unmatched printing speed, but with not a single jam during the entire printing session. Moreover, these printed documents were four – five pages at a time.
Although I’ve spoken highly of it, if you happened to replace a large office printer with this one, I doubt many would notice as the speed is truly incredible with the average page per minute being 20ppm.
In terms of quality of the documents, they are printed to an acceptable standard with blacks being dark, colors being vibrant and full sized photos not having major bleeding and that’s thanks to the laser technology found inside this printer.
My Final Thoughts
HP’s newest LaserJet Pro MFP M277dw printer is a printer that is at the top of its class and is unrivalled by any others. You find the simplicity of a home printer, but the workhorse of a large commercial grade printer. Priced at $380, HP is offering a huge bargain to the small businesses in the world who seek quality and perfection. With its incredible speed, clean design, and ease of functionality, the HP M277dw should be your next business printer.
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