HP CP1518ni Toner
LaserJet CP1518ni Toner Cartridges

The HP LaserJet CP1518ni is a color laser printer designed for the home or small office user. If you need the multi-function version, consider the HP CM2320 toner printer. The CP1518ni offers great text quality for a very affordable price, but slow speeds and expensive toner prices lower its value.

At first glance, the LaserJet CP1518ni offers a lot for a very affordable price, like the HP 1600 toner printer. Not only is it one of the most affordable color lasers on the market, but it has many nice extras like front-mounted media card slots to entice buyers. A closer look reveals that its print speeds are so slow as to be a serious drawback, even for home users. One of the main benefits of a laser printer over an inkjet is speed, and at 11 pages per minute for black and 2 pages per minute in color, the CP1518ni actually comes in slower than many inkjet printers.

Another major benefit of laser printers over inkjets is cheaper ink prices. While laser toner cartridges tend to be more expensive upfront, they last much longer, making per-page costs significantly lower. This is not necessarily the case with the CP1518ni. HP LaserJet toner cartridges are quite expensive, resulting in a per-page cost of around 3.2 cents for black and 4.6 cents for color. Using third-party compatible cartridges will offset this disadvantage. HP LaserJet toner cartridges have a capacity of 2,200 pages for black HP CP1518ni toner and 1,400 pages for each color HP CP1518ni toner cartridge.

Print quality, especially text, is quite good. Characters are sharp, dark, and defined even at small font sizes. Color quality is a mixed bag. Some color graphics are excellent, but overall color quality is below average for color laser printers. This is not unexpected for a budget color laser printer, however. Users who plan to print a lot of color should opt for a more expensive model.

Overall, the HP Color LaserJet CP1518ni has a lot of nice features and solid text quality to offer at an affordable price, but its expensive ink will cost users in the long run, and slow speeds will be noticeable to most users.