Review: HP Color LaserJet Pro M452dn Printer
This is a really good printer. I bought it because I was tired of my reliable old LaserJet 1100 chugging along at its ancient speed, incapable of anything other than black and white. I was not disappointed. This printer is modern, fast, capable of two-sided printing, and prints in very good color.
Installation wasn’t hard. I plugged it into my switch and ran the driver install on a Win7 box. It found the printer without problems. I never had to assign a fixed address or do any of the other things I’ve done in the past to make use of printers with funky drivers.
Naturally I printed some test pages. I found it did well on photographic images, though image brightness might need to be addressed prior to printing.
What I got if for, though, was printing code with full syntax coloring, and at this it flat out excels.
The only complaint I can muster is about the mysterious three-state power switch. Typically I turn it on, print something and forget it’s on. Later I find the power indicator blinking, indicating some sort of sleep mode. Then, I press the power button once to turn it off, but it actually un-sleeps and turns on again. Then I have to press it again to turn it off. A very minor complaint about a very fine printer.
I expect it to last 20 years like my last HP. For under $300 including tax, my printing problem is solved.
Driver Support
I had wanted to find out how good the driver support was with this printer. The answer is “pretty good, but not perfect.” As noted above, I had no trouble installing the printer on my Windows 7 boxes. However, I also run Windows Server 2003 and 2008. The 2008 box worked fine with the included drivers CD, but when I went to hp.com and downloaded their driver for Server 2003, it didn’t work on either the 32- or 64-bit versions of 2003 that I run. I then found their XP driver on the website, noting it was the same file as the 2003 driver. It also does not work in XP. Oh well.