HP 5P Toner
LaserJet 5P Toner Cartridges

HP 5P Printer Review

The HP LaserJet 5P is a monochrome laser printer designed for the home or small office user, like the HP 1020 toner printer. It has excellent print quality, especially text, and has generous paper capacity. Its printing speeds are slow, however.

For a home or small business printer, the 5P can actually handle a relatively high volume of prints. It has a monthly duty cycle of 12,000 pages, which should be able to accommodate quite a few users in a small office environment. This is assuming the 5P is shared across a network, of course. The 5P comes with only a parallel port for connection, but this can be converted to USB or even ethernet with the use of an adapter or print server. Sharing the 5P among too many users might warrant upgrading its memory, as the printer comes with only 2 MB or RAM. It can be upgraded to a maximum of 50 MB.

The 5P's paper capacity is quite impressive for its size and price. It can hold 350 sheets, divided among two trays. It can support a wide variety of media types, including envelopes, labels, card stock, plain paper, and transparencies. It can handle paper weights up to 43 lbs.

The HP LaserJet 5P toner cartridge has a capacity of 4,000 pages. This ensures that users won't need to replace their HP 5P toner often. Despite the affordable prices of HP 5P toner cartridges, users will save even more money by using third-party compatible HP toner cartridges instead of the branded HP LaserJet 5P toner cartridges, which are much more expensive.

Print speed is a bit on the slow side, at around 6 pages per minute, and is the HP 5P's only major downside. Print quality, however, is excellent. Text is sharp and detailed, and even small font sizes are sharp and readable.

Overall, the HP LaserJet 5P is a solid choice for its print quality and reliability, but its lack of connectivity options and its slow speeds may disappoint some buyers.