Bests & Worsts Reviews from Amazon

First, some background: for years, I have used HP black and white laserjet printers. They are work horses! The 4L I used a decade ago is still going strong, just really slow. (A friend makes use of it now). From there, we wanted the ability to duplex print, and went with a 1320nw. The wireless networking was a pain to set up with that one, but it has worked like a champ since that initial set up. My husband is a videographer part time, and makes professional quality HD videos for events, which he burns to DVD and designs full color covers for. For this, he has always used an inkjet printer. Popular opinion has been that color laser printers just couldn't compete for glossy photo quality printing, and he is very particular about his work looking professional. Unfortunately, the inkjet has been expensive (he can get maybe 15 full color covers out of each set of cartridges), and then recently, he began experiencing color inconsistencies. One cover would have different coloration than the exact same cover printed days later. Changing to new ink cartridges did not fix the issue, and we decided it was time to take a hard look at color laser printers. I carefully read reviews, and found that people liked the quality of prints from this model. The general consensus seemed to be that people were pleasantly surprised by the photo printing capabilities, with the caveat that for truly professional looking photos, have them printed by a pro place. We figured that was probably good enough for our purposes, but we wanted to check it out in person first. We went and looked at the printer for ourselves at a local box store, and used it to copy a full color ad. We were completely impressed with the color and image quality, even on regular copy paper. The speed, while slightly slow compared to true commercial machines, was still plenty fast enough for us (a LOT faster than the inkjet we had been using). We bought the printer at a great price - another bonus, color laser printers are now not all that much more than a new inkjet. After we got it home, we set it up on our network in just a few moments. We are a MAC household, and downloaded the software from HP's website with no issues. A note: if you're going to print on glossy paper for photos, MAKE SURE you get paper specifically for laser printers, not inkjet. The coating on the inkjet paper does not work with laser printers, and you risk doing your printer harm. We bought glossy "brochure paper" for laser printers that works great. This printer comes pre-loaded with "trial" size toner cartridges, good for 700 pages of printing. The regular full size cartridges will be good for almost 2000 pages. Now, as color intensive as the DVD covers we print are, I imagine that 700 number will turn out to be a lot less. However, even if it is only 100-200 copies, it will be much, much cheaper than the inkjet was to produce our covers. The first thing we did was print up several of our covers after hooking up the printer. They printed quickly, flawlessly, and with color absolutely true to the colors we saw on our computer screen, something that was honestly a new experience for us. The picture quality is as good as our admittedly 4 year old inkjet, perhaps better since we never experience the occasional streaky lines on the laser. My husband went through and reprinted covers for every DVD currently in his library of work, some 15 different pages. All of them printed perfectly. We then used the copier on several of them to compare the quality of the "copies" with the original print. They were indistinguishable to us. The scanner was next. It took a little figuring out that we needed to de-select the option that has it search for individual parts in order to get a full page scan, but it worked fine, something our old all-in-one never did. The fax is something we won't ever use, since it requires a land line, and we don't have one. But the scanner means we can just scan and e-mail documents anyway, so the fax is superfluous. We are completely happy with our new color laserjet, and if it holds up as well as the black and white versions we've had, I expect we'll still be using it several years from now. The only thing that may eventually force an upgrade will be speed, but honestly, it's plenty fast for us right now. I couldn't recommend this printer more for the price. UPDATE: It has been a month and a half, and we are still just as pleased with our purchase. The only thing missing is native duplex printing, which we already have in our black & white laserjet, so it's really not a huge issue for us. Most duplex jobs are black and white for our needs. But the reason I wanted to write this update: we are still using the trial size cartridges. We have printed perhaps 50 full color covers (and some random other stuff, not as intensive), and only the black cartridge has dropped to 30% ink capacity. The color cartridges are at 50-60% still. Given this, I think it is likely that we'll get another 25 or so out of these trial version before we have to go with the full size cartridges. This is a savings of something like 4 times over what our old inkjet did. When we get the full size cartridges, our numbers will easily double. UPDATE #2: WARNING: use only actual HP toner cartridges with this printer! We tried to save a few bucks by going with a generic brand that was supposed to be compatible. The new ink ruined our printer. I don't know if it was just a bad batch, bad luck or whatever. But a $3-400 printer is not worth ruining over $40 in ink. We ended up buying a new printer, and the genuine HP cartridges work great.