- Scan Resolution up to 1200-dpi optical, maximum scan size 8.5 inch x 14 inch
- Prints up to 12 pages per minute black, up to 8 ppm color
- Connect this MFP to a wired or wireless network
- Save energy and reduce your impact
- Use the 3.5-inch (8.89 cm) color touchscreen to access and print information
This new MFP from HP looked promising, but falls short due to their terrible software and driver bundle and lack of proper network scanning.
Replaced a Brother inkjet MFP that was half the price. The print quality on this laser is quite good, though the toner cartridges are puny and expensive, it may end up costing about the same to run as the brother inkjet.
Biggest issue is you have to install hundreds of megabytes of software just to use the printer. With the brother, it was a 16 megabyte driver that included network TWAIN scanning, and the rest was optional.
Typically business marketed network MFP''s in this price range have network scanning (dell/brother/kyocera, where one can simply walk up to the device and send your scan by email, FTP, or server file share. This is not possible with this model. The only way to scan is to run the HP toolbox on your PC and then walk over to where the printer is, then load your document and walk back. Anyone trying to use this with more than a few employees is going to go nuts.
You can scan to a USB key, which is nice, but you can''t even pick your PC from the screen. I don''t see the point of the 3" color touchscreen when you can''t really use it for anything but setting number of copies and other basic settings you never really change.
It won''t go on a wireless and wired network at the same time, which is typical, though I would have liked to make it available on the public wifi for guests to use.
The first print is pretty quick, only about 10 seconds, though the pages per minute are a bit slow, printing long 100+ page documents will take a while.
I''d recommend this unit for home use only where it''ll likely be used occasionally and by a few people. It''ll be great for that since the ink can''t dry out like inkjets, and the software is easy to use once you get it loaded. Businesses should look elsewhere.
Buy HP Laserjet CM1415FNW Now
This all-in-one printer is good at some things, but not good at others.
Printing black and white documents. Rating: 4 stars
Very clear, crisp black text like you''d expect from a laser. Its only problem is it doesn''t produce very good grays. The grays sometimes have some ugly line or grain patterns in them, even though the same document prints fine on my inkjets. Running the printer''s color calibration didn''t improve anything.
Copying black and white documents. Rating: 4 stars
Copies of black text are indistinguishable from the original. However, some grays in black and white documents either don''t show up or are faded with uneven print and are hard to see. Adjusting the darkness and other settings doesn''t cure the problem.
Printing documents with 12pt colored text in many different colors. Rating: 3 stars
Although the majority of the colors look good and are a good match to what is on screen, some of the colors have ugly line patterns in them. Running the printer''s color calibration didn''t improve anything. Neither did updating the firmware, adjusting settings, and making sure I had the latest drivers. The same documents do not have this problem when printed on my inkjet connected to the same system.
Copying color documents with 12pt colored text in many different colors. Rating: 2 stars
This is one of the big reasons I decided to return the unit. Although many of the colors do look good and are a good match to the original, some look smudgy, even though they are clear in the original. Other colors look faded with uneven print. Adjusting the darkness and other settings, running the color calibration, etc., did not improve anything. The same documents copied on a couple of Canon all-in-one inkjets look MUCH better.
Copying the same 12pt colored text document in black and white copy mode. Rating: 1 star
Much of the text is unreadable. Much of the rest is grainy. Although problems like this when trying to copy a color document in black and white mode are common on consumer grade all-in-ones.
I normally don''t print photos, so I didn''t test this ability. However, lasers are not a good choice for printing photos.
I did scan a color picture and got good results. Color matching wasn''t perfect but was decent. Flesh tones were good.
I didn''t use the fax, wireless, ethernet, or document feeder on the scanner, so I can''t comment on those.
Hooking up the unit by USB and installing the software on Vista 32 bit was easy. However, the software installed some autostarting bloatware junk. The software does give the option of just installing print and scan drivers or the HP Toolbox and other stuff as well. I probably should have just installed the scan/print drivers, as this might have eliminated that problem.
This printer also draws less power than some other brands of laser printers, according to its specs. I''ve read that some brands of laser printers will actually dim the room lights on startup. This was not a problem on this model.
There is one important thing to note about this printer if you ever intend to conserve color toner by printing color documents in grayscale (black and white). The printer may still consume color toner by mixing all 4 colors to produce different shades of gray or black. You need to specify in the print driver settings to use black toner only for grayscale if you want to conserve color toner when printing in grayscale. This setting is mentioned in Chapter 8, Table 1 of the electronic version of the manual.
Read Best Reviews of HP Laserjet CM1415FNW Here
I purchased this item directly from HP''s small-medium business (SMB) center. I was looking for a printer to replace my Brother MFC-9840CDW, which is a color/wireless all-in-one (AIO). Brother had not come out with a newer model that bettered this AIO that I have had for a couple of years. Since I was going to have to buy multiple new Brother toner cartridges for color, which would be 1/2 the price of a completely new model, I was in the market for a new AIO. My reqirements were AIO, laser, color, wireless networking and good user feedback. My Brother repair center told me that they can definitely tell the difference in HP color printers versus the other guys. Since my Brother gave out weak/light color prints, and the color accuracy was pretty bad, I wanted to like the HP LaserJet Pro CM1415fnw, which just came out and did not have any user comments.
I purchased from HP''s SMB with a 30-day return policy. If you go through another center, your return period may be shorter. When I opened the box, only the main unit and an installation guide were inside. The box said I should get power/USB/phone cables and an installation CD, but they were missing. Due to a backorder delay, I was advised to order a new unit and ship the old one back. I got the drivers online and used a spare 3-prong computer-type power cable to test out the unit. Based on my findings in the rest of this review, I will be returning the HP for my money back.
I wanted wireless to minimize the cables going into my Apple Mac mini (mid-2010) which also has built-in wireless networking. I am running Windows 7 Ultimate 64-bit via Boot Camp. You initially need the USB cable so the installation software can configure the unit to your computer and router. Once that was done, the computer was able to see the HP right away. This was much easier than the Brother, which required me to manually configure both the computer and AIO, and I had to call Brother''s customer service, even though I am computer savvy.
I don''t need much color, since I mostly print documents, nevertheless I would only consider laser for black or color. The color is definitely better than Brother. However, the color on the HP is a little too saturated and printing color is not quite as sharp as printing black. I made a color copy of a color copy, and the saturation increased, further distorting the original image. You get starter toner cartridges that are about 60% full. HP is not the only manufacturer doing that these days.
The paper tray is a puny 150 pages. The Brother has a 250-sheet tray and I purchased a 500 sheet 2nd tray. You cannot add a second tray to the HP. Also, the HP does not have a manual feed tray for envelopes or other paper. The Brother nicely holds 3 envelopes at a time in its manual feed tray. The HP claims to have a manual feed for envelopes, but all it does is pause printing until you pull out the tray, pull out your paper, slide the guides to envelope size, insert your envelopes, close the tray, and then you may have to tell it to print the envelope (I never bothered to print an envelope from the HP after discovering how convoluted the process is). I would have likely kept the HP if it had a manual feed for envelopes, and I only had to pull out the tray to add fancy bond paper. This AIO is not made for any office work in which you print letters, unless you only print envelopes in batches. So why would any home or small office buy one?
When I print a letter to my Brother, my Word document has the first page(s) formatted as an envelope(s) and the remaining pages letter-size. The documents also have Word''s Page Setup defined to pull paper from the designated tray: manual feed for envelopes, 250-sheet Tray 1 for letter-size bond paper for correspondence, and 500-sheet Default Tray (Tray 2) for regular letter-size paper for everything else.
I liked the fact that the HP has a color touchpad as its user interface. But in real use in making copies, you have to touch the screen to wake it up and then hit the print button. Dedicated print buttons would have been preferred, one for black and one for color like the Brother.
The unit stays pretty quiet and printing noise is not excessive. I do not notice the fan running as loud as the Brother after a print or copy job. It occasionally self-calibrates, but infrequent enough to not be excessively annoying. The HP''s first page out when printing comes out in one-third or one-quarter the time as the Brother, which takes about 1-minute from sleep mode and acts like it is printing 3-pages before it actually prints the first page. The HP is smaller than the Brother, but I would gladly trade a little height to get a bigger tray and options for a manual feed or an additional tray.
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The sole reason I bought this printer was I went to use my color ink jet Lexmark which was once again out of ink. It seemed every time I went to use my color printer it was out of ink. Seemed like it was drying up and jamming the ink heads between uses. At $50 every time I decided to go color laser. I bought this one at office max on sale for $379. We also have a Brother 2070N and also just bought a Brother 2270DW for $50 (had some max perk points, was on sale for $99 normaly $149). Anyway the HP is a nice printer that I have to print graphics for some design work and also photos for the kids school projects. We knew this would only replace the ink jet as it does not have high capacity toner cartridges available. While you can buy refurbished toner cartridges for half the cost of new I do not want to run the risk of jamming up the drum like cheap ink jet cartridges do to the heads on those. Which leads me to the significance of replacing our Brother printer as well. Virtually the same day I bought the HP the notification to replace the drum on the Brother 2070N came on and would no longer print. Never replaced it since we owned it for several years but checked with office max and a replacement was $132! This is our workhorse for printing up tests, research documents and publications for my fiance who is a college prof. so printing 150 page document occurs every few days with daily prints of 30 pages average. By all means the HP will put you in the poor house if you print documents. I''ve had mine for 4 weeks and it is already asking for a new black toner cartridge. While there are $50 high capacity toner in black that say up to 2500 pages in 5% coverage, I don''t think it is worth the risk of having to replace the drum on the HP.
So, If you have to print color or copy occasionally with wireless this is a good printer. If you print a lot of documents have a backup black and white laser with high capacity cartridges available. (2500+)
I''ve been using computers since the early days of the Apple II. In that time, I''ve used a wide variety of printers. Everything from teletype based devices, to dot matrix, to inkjets and lasers. Some have been great and some terrible, with many in between. In that time, I have never had a printer that I''ve liked as much as this one, and that is really saying something. It just does everything I want and it does it well. Some have mentioned that it doesn''t print envelopes well. I don''t use mine for envelopes at all, so I can''t comment on that one way or the other. That just isn''t a need I have. If you do have a need for an envelope printer, proceed carefully and make sure any printer you get can do this well. It can be tricky to get a good envelope printer as many printers have struggled with this (though there are several that are quite good at it).
I should note that this is my first All-In-One(AIO), meaning it prints, scans, copies, and faxes. These are sometimes referred to as multifunction printers (MFPs) too. For years I had shied away from AIOs because you could never get the best printer and the best scanner and the best software all rolled into one device and also because if you lost one device, you lost them all. In the last five years or so, I had noticed that these devices were getting much better, but I didn''t want one that was inkjet based (due to the higher costs per page of inkjets) so I waited. When this AIO came out, I finally decided to give them a try. I have to say, I was very impressed with how well it worked and really like the space savings I have now that I don''t have to have a printer and a scanner separately.
Pros:
+Fantastic color output. It really rivals most inkjets. I''ve owned several color lasers and this one is far better than any others I have used (Samsung, Konica-Minolta, Brother, HP).
+Great on-screen color menu that is very easy to use.
+Clean design. I looked long and hard at the Brother AIOs, but really didn''t like their (or HP''s higher end AIO models) due to their old fashioned hard button design. They had dedicated buttons. I much prefer the big color display on this model.
+Low power consumption in idle mode.
+Fast print speeds. Some have complained about how slow this printer prints, but there are some things that they may not be taking into account. This printer in idle mode only uses about 3 watts of power (I measured this using my kill a watt meter). This is very low, even for idle mode and means I can keep my printer on at all times. This is especially important for wireless devices, because why bother with wireless if you have to get up and go turn it on just to use it? You might as well plug a cord in at that point. The first page does take awhile to print. I timed mine on several first page prints and it averaged around 30 35 seconds. Subsequent pages printed very fast. So you might be wondering why does the first page take so long? It is because this printer uses a lower power idle mode. This means that if you leave it on like I like to do, it will barely cost you any money. It also means that the first page of any document you print will take about half a minute, but subsequent pages will print quickly. So you decide if you like this or not. I do. I much prefer it this way. Others may not. Sadly you can''t set this option in the software or on the printer.
+Ability to print from any computer anywhere on the Internet. With this printer you can setup an email address for the printer and then email documents to that address for printing (including pictures). They will print immediately if the printer is on and if it is off, they will print the next time you turn it on. I really like this feature. It just works and works well.
+Sheet feeder. The sheet feeder works well on this device and works with a variety of sizes. Like I said before, I haven''t tried envelopes, so I don''t know how well it works for those.
+Output tray. I really like the design of the output tray. A lot of printers use those flimsy output trays that dump everything at the top on some sort of cheap plastic sleeve sticking out that can easily break off. This printer outputs printed documents into an ample slot under the scanner. It is simple and effective.
+Driver installation. The drivers were incredibly easy to install on all of my computers. I run Windows 7 64bit on most of my PCs but I also run XP Pro and Vista on a few including a notebook. The drivers were incredibly easy to install and wifi was very easy to setup. In fact, it was the easiest installation for a wifi printer that I''ve ever had.
+Minimal design of drivers. I really hate drivers that pop up all the time taking over my computer just to blare at me what they are doing, like a spoiled child. The HP drivers for this printer alert you that they are doing their job when you print something, but with minimal impact on what you are doing on your computer and they leave a pretty small footprint (meaning they don''t take up a lot of resources).
+Ease of changing toner cartridges. For this printer, there is an easy to open door on the front. You can easily swap out old toner cartridges for new ones. I''ve had several other printers where it is the back and you have to move stuff around and clean off your desk just to switch cartridges or pry them loose. This one is a breeze!
+Can fax, scan, or copy multiple pages easily.
+Quite. This is the quietest color laser I''ve owned. My old Konica sounded like it had a cat hidden inside trying to escape. This one will make noise once in awhile to calibrate, but in idle mode it is silent. When it prints it is relatively quiet. This is a big plus to me because I hate noise.
+Wireless. This is not HPs highest AIO, but it is the best wireless AIO they offer. I just love having wireless for my printer/scanner/copy/fax device.
+Web connectivity is really cool. There are many apps you can download to the printer so you can print out your favorite newspaper, calendar, games for the kids, etc. These apps work well.
I''m sure there are other pros, but those are all I can think of right now.
Cons:
-Kind of big. My last color laser was a Samsung that was very small, no bigger than the smallest monochrome lasers. It suffered from poor print quality and was not an All-In-One (AIO) like this one. Having the scanner on top does add to the size. The toner cartridges were hard to replace on the Samsung too. I wouldn''t describe this printer as huge, but it is tall. Be sure it will fit where you want to put it before buying.
-Manual duplex only. There is driver support, but you have to do it by hand.
-Small paper tray. It holds 150 pages. There are several models that hold 250. For me this isn''t a big issue, but if you do a lot of printing, it might be.
-Scanner software is limited. As with any multifunction device, there will be issues with something. The weakness of this one in my opinion is the scanner software. It doesn''t have many options and you can''t use the touch menu controls to scan to your PC. This could be better.
-Pricey. It lists for $450. Mine cost $375 on sale and you can now get it as low as $350 some places, which is much better. Amazon needs to lower their price to be competitive.
This printer does support the Mac OS, but I haven''t tried it with a Mac.
Overall, I am very happy with this printer. I like it so much I wish my old Konica I use in my classroom would die, so I could replace it with one of these like I have at home. It is by far the best printer I have ever used.
