HP Color LaserJet Pro 4202dw Review

Design and Features

• Smart design
• Strong features
• Annoying controls

HP has given up localising to British English, so ‘Color’ LaserJet Pro 4202dw it is. I like this printer’s appearance; its blue front panel is a hallmark of HP’s enterprise printers, and a welcome splash of colour on a device that – let’s face it – would hardly set the heart pounding otherwise.

The 4202dw’s strong specifications go beyond fast speeds and good durability. It has automatic duplex (double-sided) printing, helping you save paper or just produce professional-looking documents and handouts. Concealed behind the blue panel you’ll find both a 250-sheet paper tray…

…and a 50-sheet multipurpose feed – useful if you want to keep a stock of plain and headed paper without having to keep unloading and reloading.

Connectivity is excellent, with a USB port for direct connection to a single PC, and both wired and wireless networking making it easy to share among users. On the top panel there’s also a USB host port, used for direct prints from an inserted thumb drive. That’s helpful if you have visitors who might want to print, or if you want to stand over the printer while you print off a batch of payslips or other confidential documents.

The Color LaserJet Pro 4202dw uses a new menu system that pairs a push/twist control wheel with a decent sized backlit mono display. Unfortunately I found this disappointing and even a bit annoying in practice. As you’d expect, you twist the wheel to navigate the printer’s various menus, and press it to select options. However, the large text and long menus mean lots of scrolling, and the wheel doesn’t feel like a precision implement. I couldn’t always see the connection between how fast I spun and how quickly the menu focus moved – when I had far to go it was too slow, and yet it often seemed too sensitive and unpredictable for small steps.

It’s worth mentioning that, unlike some other laser printers, this one doesn’t have any vents at either side. That gives it a clean look, but also means you can work it back into a narrower space – you just need access at the front and top, with a little ventilation space to the rear. It comes already fitted with consumables rated for a fair 1,200 black or 1,000 colour pages, so there’s not much physical setup to do.

Laser printers seem to be losing their running costs battle with inkjets, and unfortunately the HP Color LaserJet Pro 4202dw is no exception. It takes a consumable each for black, cyan, magenta and yellow printing, with the standard replacements good for only 2,000 black pages, or 1,800 in colour. Using the best prices I could find online this worked out at 3.9p per black page, and a whopping 19.7p for a full colour (black, cyan, magenta and yellow) page.

Happily, things are better with the high-capacity supplies. They’re good for 7,500 black or 5,500 colour pages, and work out at a 12.4p per full-colour page. That’s actually not bad for a colour laser, but many cartridge-based inkjets cost less, while a refillable inkjet would be around 10 times cheaper to run.

The HP Color LaserJet Pro 4202dw supports wireless networks in the 2.4 and 5GHz bands, but it didn’t get on well with my usually rock-solid mesh system. HP’s PC driver setup program couldn’t find the printer; I had to enter its IP (network) address manually. Even then, the driver lost touch with it whenever it went into power saving mode, which quickly proved impractical. I ended up starting again with a wired connection to my router.

Print speed and quality

• Fast printing across the board
• Strong print quality

Printers never reach their rated speeds on our benchmarks, which include the extra time taken by the host PC to prepare and transfer the print job – a more realistic measure of real-world performance. Even so, the HP Color LaserJet Pro 4202dw got close. It needed just 11 seconds to print the first page of our text test, finishing all five sheets in 20 seconds – a 15.0 pages per minute (ppm) performance. This increased to 24.9ppm over 20 pages, and 30.0ppm on a 50-page document.

It was much the same story for colour prints, with a first page taking 14 seconds, but five prints completing at 14.3ppm. The printer reached 25.0ppm over 20 colour pages. Like most laser printers, the 4202dw prints at half the speed when you select maximum print quality in the driver, but it still delivered an A4 photo in just 22 seconds.

Text quality is always strong in laser printers, and this one was no exception. I looked at print samples using an eye glass, and even when magnified, text looked crisp and free of jagged edges.

I can’t always say the same for graphics, but here the HP Color LaserJet Pro 4202dw is one of the best lasers I’ve tested. It delivered punchy illustrations and cartoons, mastered colour text, and even did a great job on photos. While some lasers leave tell-tale patterns, or struggle to cope with smooth shade transitions, this one took everything in its stride. My only slight complaint was that colours were perhaps a little too rich, leaving everything looking just a touch serious – personally I’d prefer a slightly more saturated, brighter bias.

Should you buy it?