HP CP1525nw

HP’s Laserjet Pro CP1525nw is a colour, single-function laser printer with a small footprint and built-in Wi-Fi. It's great for the space-starved home office without a whole lot of network infrastructure.

Thanks to Wi-Fi Protected Setup (WPS), establishing a connection with any WPS-enabled router takes a few button-presses on each device and around twenty seconds all up. Installing the printer driver on your PC is going to take far longer than this, so it’s a nice start.

Print speed is mediocre, at an advertised 12ppm black, 8ppm colour. With plain black text and line art, print speed averaged 10 pages per minute in our tests. Magazine pages comprised of colour text and graphics averaged seven pages per minute – impressively close to the advertised figure.

The recommended monthly load of 250-1000 pages is also quite low, giving you approximately 12-50 pages per business day.

The CP1525nw ships with 750 pages worth of toner. Full toner cartridges will give you 2000 pages black ($113 ex GST), and 1300 pages Cyan, Yellow and Magenta ($107 ex GST), at an approximate cost of six cents/page for monochrome prints, and 30 cents/page for colour.

Print quality is very high on this model. Great colour, high detail and minimal banding in large flat-coloured areas combine to produce good photographs. Lightweight text and line art both print with above-average clarity.

That high print quality combined with middling speed and low monthly load makes the CP1525nw ideal for small-volume creative work – for instance, proofs of advertising material or handouts that you’ll later have professionally printed. This is not the kind of printer you’d use to churn out invoices for your high-volume online store, or print class handouts for thirty students every day or two.