HP Colour LaserJet CM1312 Toner Cartridges

Design

With the release of its Colour LaserJet CM1312 colour laser printer, HP has unleashed a powerful multifunction printer into the home and small office printing market. The printer includes a powerful set of external functions, including an LCD screen that communicates everything from low ink to printing errors and the scanner's progress. External buttons allow users to control the scanner without using computer software; and these buttons allow the scanner to do double duty as a copier. Copying documents is pretty straightforward and does not require the use of a computer to complete. This is relatively standard for modern printers, but it's still worth noting.

Disadvantages

One of the unfortunate drawbacks of the LaserJet CM1312 is that it significantly underperforms as compared to the claims made in HP's official product specifications. While HP claims that this printer can produce a solid 12 pages per minute when dealing with black and white text, that is simply not the case. Tests revealed this printer to be capable of exactly half that - 6 black and white textual pages per minute. That's excruciatingly slow, even for a home printer. For colour pages, the results were equally dismal. the LaserJet CM1312 managed less than five colour pages per minute, despite HP claiming it could churn out eight pages per minute in full colour.

Printing these pages was a noisy process, with the device calibrating itself and making quite intrusive humming, grinding, and clicking noises while it did so. Even so, those loud noises must have been a good thing, because the print quality on this machine is second to none. Images were vibrant and text was rich and easy to read with no fading or glitches. For a consumer printer, HP's really meets the mark.

Advantages

Despite its slow printing speed and a bizarre set of noises that seem to occur at the most random of times, the HP Colour LaserJet CM1312 is a very good printer for homes or small offices. It certainly won't print a lot of pages in a small amount of time, but that's somewhat negligible for many consumers when the images are vivid and bright and the text is a rich black.