The Affordable HP LaserJet 1020 Printer

The affordable HP LaserJet 1020 printer is a very low priced laser jet printer it seems to be ideally suited to a home office user who only needs occasional print duties to be performed. It delivers nice quality of text and, because of its price,  overall print costs per sheet should be nice and low. It is one of several printers of various capabilities within the 1000 series offered by Hewlett-Packard, by the way.

This monochrome laser jet printer is capable of printing about 14 pages per minute of products, which is about average for a laser jet printer in this price point and market segment. As long as one keeps in mind that this unit is to be employed as a personal laser monochrome printer and not as the office’s primary workplace printer, there should be little to quibble over in terms of print speed.

It can be hooked up to a PC very easily via its USB connection, which is the only way that the printer can be joined up to a personal computer. It has no capability to be operated using a Mac, so keep that in mind if one is contemplating purchasing a low-priced personal monochrome laser printer for use with one of Apple’s products. There are other higher-priced (though not all that much higher in price) printers suitable to that role.

The quality of the print product that emerges from the 1020 will be fine, coming out as it does at 600 dots per inch resolutions. It’ll also come out fairly quickly, with the first sheet emerging from the printer in only 10 seconds from the time it is tasked from the computer. Hewlett-Packard has included a specific image enhancement technology tool for their 1000 series of printers that helps to keep print product looking good.

Maximum and standard onboard memory is 2 MB of RAM, which should be more than enough to handle any sort of print job being contemplated to be produced by the 1020 printer. It’ll all be controlled by a standard 234 MHz microprocessor, which does its job well enough to make sure that there’ll be no issues with lining up and then printing out concurrent or consecutive print jobs.

The 1020 can also handle a variety of media type materials when it comes to printing out product. This includes envelopes, labels, plain paper and transparencies as well as business cards. There is a 150 sheet maximum capacity and it has a 5000 pages per month maximum duty cycle. For a small personal printer, this is actually a very good number and will mean that any maintenance to be done will be few and far between.

The printer makes use of one black toner cartridge and it can run off of several different Windows operating systems, including XP and Windows ME. There’s a one-year warranty supplied with the printer and that can be extended for an additional length of time after payment of the nominal fee. The printer looks durable enough and it promises typical (meaning very good) Hewlett-Packard reliability.

For a price of about $150 new for the HP LaserJet 1020 printer, one will be getting a capable and durable machine that will print most things well and will also accomplish most tasks with little problem. Check the Internet carefully, because prices for this unit have been ranging as high as $370 from some stores. Given its nice functional capability, it’s easy to see why many people prefer the 1000 series of printers as their personal machines. When it comes time to get more toner, do a search online for HP toner and find the cheapest HP LaserJet 1020 toner available.