Home A Printer Built for Today

A Printer Built for Today

If there is one thing that is a given at our office, it’s that everything happens quickly. It’s the world we now live in, where companies are doing more with less, and that also means with fewer employees, less time, and less office infrastructure to support them. Which means everyone, whether it be people or technology, has to work harder today than ever before. And the one piece of office equipment that seemed to not get the note is our good friend, the office printer.

Admit it, we all have a love/hate relationship with our printers. On the one hand, as much as we keep hearing about the paperless office, it seems that every generation of office technology winds up with us pumping out more and more paper from our printers. So we need them, but on the other hand, there is no piece of equipment that has steadfastly resisted the urge to move at ‘Internet speed.” It’s what leads to scenes like the legendary “baseball bat and a printer” moment in the movie Office Space.

Really, at the end of the day, we just want our printers to work and work quickly because there is nothing more frustrating than staring at a printer as everyone is filing into the conference room down the hall. So you can imagine our relief when our new HP Color LaserJet Pro MFP M477 printer just…worked. One of the most painful things about printers is that first page. Is it printing or is it not printing. Do I need to push a button or run back and fire up the print dialog again? Wait, did it go to sleep?

This HP gets going and going quickly. The first page was on its way in seconds and even more impressively it was able to get down to business in about 12 seconds after being in sleep mode. And this performance didn’t seem to degrade even when we put it into duplex or copying mode.

However, all this performance brings up the other hated part of modern printers: cartridges. They are dirty, hard to change, and seem to start running out of ink about three minutes after you put in a new one. In the case of the HP printer, the cartridge is actually part of what makes this printer so speedy. The toner has been re-engineered toner to melt at a lower temperature, which is part of the secret to how the printer gets going so quickly.

But it has also been designed to pump out more pages per cartridge and be more reliable reporting its status when it does start running low. And, finally, to the relief of anyone who has ever released a printer toner cloud on themselves by mistake, the new HP cartridge has finally gotten rid of the dreaded Pull Tab.

Finally, let’s talk about the other problem with printers: getting them onto the network and connected. In our office, we like all our printers wireless which can cause problems. The HP was able to find and connect to our network the first time, and then the HP Easy Start software walked us through installing the drivers. From pulling the printer out of the box to printing the first page, we were in business in under ten minutes. That included us downloading the substantial Easy Start software from the always helpful 123.hp.com support site, which also includes the software for using the printer for faxes.

The HP M477 is a great option for any modern multi-function printer that can also fax and scan. But as we all know, if it fails as a printer, it’s probably not going to stay in an office for very long. And in this day and age where we are all working at light speed, you need a printer that can keep up and not slow you down. It’s nice to see that manufacturers finally got the memo.

This article was produced in partnership with HP. For more information on HP’s printers, please go here.

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