The Hewlett Packard LaserJet 6L

The Hewlett Packard LaserJet 6L PCL is my first laser printer. Actually it belongs to my brother but I’m now using it for printing work brought home and my papers for my studies. I’ve read about paper jams and how the printer is rather not-user-friendly. In the past two months or so that I’ve used it, it has not given me much trouble. Except that I keep forgetting which side it prints on so I have a hard time determining which printed side faces up when loading paper into the top-loader.

The printer is rather heavy, and is of a rather bulky size and design. The vertical paper loader is placed on the top and there are two choices of how the printer paper is unloaded. Either into a holding bin next to the top paper loader/bin or straight out towards the front like conventional inkjet printers. Here are the pros and cons in no particular order:

The pros
- Printer is readily supported by Windows 98/ME, no driver disk required!
- Very easy installation. All I did was plug it in, and Windows did the rest. The printer has no power button, just a paper feed and eject button.
- Software application CD comes with some useful programs like Web-printed which allows you to print web-pages in book formats.
- Solid black text, readable even at low-resolution.
- Four convenient resolution modes, 75, 150, 300 and 600 dots per inch (dpi). The 75 dpi setting is especially useful for saving toner and printing drafts for yourself. For draft reports, the 150 dpi setting will suffice.
- Doesn’t take long to warm up and fairly quick, about 6 pages per minute or so of normal text and graphics documents (I printed a very text-heavy application form with tables and small graphics and the printer spat it out in less than 20 seconds).
- Choice of top or front paper off-loading.
- Choice of auto or manual paper feeding.
- Large capacity (about 150) paper top load bin and off-loading storage bin.
- Upgradeable memory (mine has 1 megabyte upgradeable to 8MB).
- Economy power-saving mode.
- Quiet operation.

The cons
- Does not come with a USB port, only parallel.
- A bit too heavy and rather large foot print by today’s standards for a laser printer.
- Expensive toner cartridges! Refills are risky and messy.
- Rather bulky design and a “not-so-cool” look. Largely due to the vertical paper load and storage bins. :-)
- Papers curl awkwardly when ejected out front or dropped into storage bin on top. This obstruct other pages being ejected. This is especially true with thicker/coated paper.
- Some noticeable banding in grayscale images and photographs.
- Power cable a bit too short for my liking (about two yards).
- No direct-networking but easily shared on a network through a host PC. This printer was shared among many other client PCs in my brother’s office without any glitches before it ended up in my bedroom.

There you have it, more pros than cons. Should you invest in this printer? For a small business owner, I think you’ll be satisfied with this printer. For a college student, MBA student etc., this printer is more than enough to serve your papers and reports printing needs. I’d like to get another ink-jet printer to provide for color printing needs. Most newer printer models today come with USB connections, parallel is slowing being phased out but is still a convenient feature to have both at the same time.

Bottom line?
With so many budget laser printers to choose from, which should you really settle for? A very hard decision to make but keep this in mind. You may read many positive reviews of many laser printers on Epinions, but most of the reviewers probably have not gone through even their first toner cartridge. And that should be your main concern if you print a lot. With the HP 6L, my brother has gone through a few and he says although they do last a while, they cost a fair sum too. So choose wisely. Happy shopping!