hey everybody its LAN side-bend we’re taking a look today at an inexpensive all-in-one laser printer from HP this is their m14 8f DW and at the time I’m recording this video it is being sold for one hundred and fifty bucks on Amazon we’re gonna take a closer look at this printer and why you might want to go with a laser over an inkjet in just a second but I do want to let you know in the interest of full disclosure if this is on loan from HP so when we’re done with this we put it back in the box and send it back to them all the opinions you’re about to hear are my own nobody is paying for this review more has anyone reviewed or approved what you’re about to see before it was uploaded so let’s get into it now and see what this printer is all about so let’s take a closer look now at the hardware this is pretty compact for an all-in-one laser printer you’re looking at about 16 inches deep here or 40.6 4 centimeters about 15 inches across or 38.1 centimeters and about a foot high that’s about 30 centimeters or so so not all that large
and what’s nice is that the printer operates within this size a lot of printers have this footprint but then you have to fold down the door to get the paper in this one is able to accommodate the paper here you don’t need to have this door down to use it unless you’re trying to get to the secondary paper tray otherwise it is closed up here and what you see here is what you’ll need on your desk for space it doesn’t hold a huge amount of paper but it can accommodate 250 sheets here on the lower tray that’s about half a ream of paper and then of course you can load in individual labels or envelopes and things here on the manual feeder this is probably fine for what you might use in a small office now the price point on this one is very similar to what you might see in a comparable inkjet printer and the question might be what’s the advantage of having a black and white laser printer versus a color inkjet printer and the reason really comes down to how often you print and what you want to pay per page now one of the things that I like about laser printers is that they can sit longer without what I call a consumable penalty on an inkjet printer if those those Jets get clogged up because you had the printer sitting around for a month or two between prints you have to use ink to actually clean out those print heads to get everything flowing again on a laser printer you don’t have that issue now of course the trade off with this one is that it’s only black and white
and not color but if color is not important to you and you only print every couple of days you probably will see a better return on investment or at least they lower cost of operation here using this printer versus an inkjet now the toner cartridges on this one are a little different than what I’ve seen on other HP printers because they have separated the toner cartridge here from the printhead so usually on these HP printers you buy a cartridge that has both components and they tend to be rather expensive now because they’ve kind of separated the print mechanism here between two consumables you will probably spend a little bit less on the toner cartridges than you might have done so with HP printers in the past now a lot of HP’s competitors have been doing this for a while now on this printer you’re looking at a 1200 page cartridge for about 47 dollars they have a twenty eight hundred page cartridge that will run you about eighty-five dollars and then the drum is good for about 23,000 pages or so and that will cost about 89 dollars to replace so if you go with that 2,800 page cartridge you’re looking at probably about three cents per page which I think does cost a little less than what you might experience on an inkjet printer especially if you are printing occasionally now when these companies rate how many pages you can get they’re assuming you’re printing out documents similar to this one where you have you know words on the page not a lot of photos or graphics or anything like that if you do start printing photos and graphics that use a lot of toner and occupy more of the page when things are printed
you will see a lower page count than what they’re saying the cartridges will provide but typically for standard business documents legal documents and that sort of thing this is about the performance you can expect out of this and again it will be more consistent because of the fact the printer doesn’t have to clean itself out every couple of days now I was a little disappointed that setup on this printer was not as easy as other HP printers I have looked at now you’ve got a bunch of differ ways you can connect it what I like to do with printers nowadays is attach them to my Wi-Fi network or plug them into Ethernet and then have my computers and everything configure themselves automatically this printer will allow you to connect to a Wi-Fi network but it only allows a WPS connection that’s something where you enable WPS on the printer then you have to run over to your router and push a button on it to get that connection to work it usually works pretty well it worked for me but I would have preferred the ability to go in and find the network I wanted to connect to and type the password in it did not offer that option to me again though you can plug it in via ethernet if you haven’t near your router or network switch that of course will get it right up with practically zero configuration you can also connect computers directly via the USB port and there’s also a Wi-Fi direct option where you can have your mobile devices connect to the printers Wi-Fi directly to print now once the printer is on the network it’s very easy to get it set up on Windows and on the Mac you should just see the printer appear so right now we are on my Windows machine here I’m going to click on add printer it will search the network and it will find it here it is and I can just add the device here
and get printing so it’s pretty easy without having to download any software to get all this stuff working and that’s why I usually recommend just get the printer on the network don’t futz with the software all your computers will usually find it pretty quickly after that alright so let’s take a look now and see how fast the printer can print out and what the images look like when you do that I’ve got a bunch of gibberish text up here a couple of pages long that I’m going to print out from WordPad and I’m just going to select the printer as you can see it’s already been configured automatically on this Windows tablet I’m going to click on print now and it will connect up to the printer over the network spins up pretty quickly even when it’s sleeping and you can see how fast everything prints out here it is a little bit noisier than what you might experience with an inkjet printer but it does as you can see print out pretty quickly here they rate this at 30
pages per minute and if you are just doing basic text like this it will come out very fast and you can see what this basic document looks like here now it can also do Oh duplexing where it prints on both sides of the page at the same time so if you click on preferences before you print you will see an option to print on both sides and we’ll just say yes flip over and hit okay and then we’re going to go ahead and print out this document again so let’s click print and we’ll switch back to the printer now and we’ll see how fast it can do a duplex documents what it’s going to do is it’s going to print out the first page you’ll see it starts to come out of the paper well here and then it’s going to suck it back in and print on the other side so a little bit slower than printing out everything on one page but again you can automatically have it print on both sides of the paper you also have the ability to scan with this device but you have to initiate your scans from a computer or from a mobile device you can’t walk up to this hit a button and have it send to your devices automatically scan quality I found to be about what you would expect out of a device at this price point the auto document feeder here holds 35 pages at a time it does not do two-sided scanning so you’ll have to flip things over and run them through again to get that functionality going with it but you can scan over the network and you can use multiple
applications to do it so for example I’ve got Windows 10 loaded up here with the built-in fax and scan application once I connected to the printer initially it will now see this as a printer but also as a scanner you can see it’s showing up right here on our available scan options you can also use the HP app that you can get on the Windows Store or you can of course install it separately there’s a version of this for the Mac as well I’ve already got it ready to go here and I’ll just click scan so you can see how fast that auto document feeder reads at and there you go so in goes the documents not a terribly fast scanner but if you have documents to scan every once in a while this isn’t a bad way to get things done especially at this price point now although the printer is black and white it will scan in color so you can load a photograph here onto the scan bed and get it in at up to 1200 dpi now this is also a fax machine if you still need to send the fax every once in a while there is a phone jack in the back for connecting it up to your telephone network you can initiate faxes directly from the control panel here you can also make copies directly from the control panel just by pushing the copy button there you have the ability just to do a quick copy if you need to do that but you can also adjust the brightness or darkness of the outputted image if you need to with a little button right there for that now it works pretty nicely with mobile devices if you have an iPhone it will support the air print protocol this will also work on the iPad so for example I’ve got a photo here I can just click print from my photo menu here it will
prepare the image and then we have the option to send it over to the printer as you can see here I found it on the network automatically and I can just go ahead and click print here and in a second or two I’ll get a black and white version of this image coming off the printer right from my phone if you have a Chromebook you can connect to the printer with Google Cloud Print I did a video a few year or two ago now about how to do that on HP printers and I’ll put that down below in the video description so you can find out how to get connected with that Google Cloud Print will also work with your Android devices too and remember if you have a phone that supports Wi-Fi direct printing you can connect to the printers Wi-Fi and print that way too now one last thing to check out and that is HP’s mobile app if you’ve used this app on other printers it’s the same for this one when you’re on your network you can see your printers status and how much toner it has left in it you can do things like scan documents and print documents from it so right now I’m going to maybe initiate a scan here I can hit the gear icon to select the input type will say document or a PDF and then we’ll say input source automatic so it should detect that auto document feeder by itself here we’ll go ahead and click the blue button to do that scan and when we do that it will initiate it over the network here it will drop it into my iPhone and then I can take that document and toss it out to an email application or bring it to my document management software like Evernote or something like that so I can do that right from here and the experience on Android will be very similar so that is the HP m14 AF DW I think it’s decent device for the price
point 150 bucks gets you a very fast laser printer here really nice sharp text and a functional scanner copier fax to do all the things that you might do in a small office or a home office and again because it’s laser there’s not the penalty if you’re not printing to it all that often you should see about a 3 cent per page print cost out of this that won’t fluctuate depending on how often you print I also like how compact it is and that the paper actually fits inside the device versus having a drawer hanging out all the time so altogether I really nice put nicely put together device but my only gripe with it is the setup especially as it relates to Wi-Fi WPS is very easy but I would have liked the option to select the Wi-Fi network and put the password in on the printer itself if you do have internet nearby that might be the best way to go just plug it in and it will be accessible to all of your devices on the network you’ll quickly be able to scan from it and print to it and I think all in a pretty nice value here from HP until next time this is LAN Simon thanks for watching this channel is brought to you by the lon TV supporters including gold-level supporters Chris Allegretto the four guys with quarters podcast Tom Albrecht a new zaveri in cali an kumar if you want to help the channel you can by contributing as little as a dollar a month head over to LAN TV slash support to learn more and don’t forget to subscribe
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