The HP LaserJet 8150dn printer and its capabilities are on full display whenever this monochrome printer is given full reign in a small or medium-sized business. In comparison to many other monochrome laser printers available out on the market, this particular Hewlett-Packard would probably be considered mid-priced and characteristic. It is a speedy printer with a lot of reliability, especially with the quality of the print as offered by the 8150dn printer toners.

That print speed comes to the fore right away, with the 8150dn able to kick out product at a fast 32 pages per minute. For a business needing a workhorse network printer, it's hard to find many much better than this Hewlett-Packard model. It is able to juggle a number of different print jobs effortlessly and it has a decently fast processor to help it along.

When it comes to all of the different media types that the printer can produce product on, it's probably best to say that the 8150dn is extremely versatile. All the standard media types, including envelopes, labels, transparencies, letter and legal sizes, as well as a wide variety of non-standard paper sizes can be handled by this printer. That's sure to make it attractive to most any network, for sure.

Connectivity is carried out via means of Hewlett-Packard's bread-and-butter ports. One can expect to be able to hook up the printer either with the traditional parallel port or with a modern and up-to-date Ethernet 10/100 Base-TX printer port. Either will give the IT specialist responsible for hooking it to the network very little trouble, if any at all, in truth.

Print resolution is another area in which this Hewlett-Packard monochrome printer stands out, delivering as it does 1,200 dots per inch of quality printing using HP printer toner Coming as that kind of quality printing does, from what is best classed as a workhorse printer, it's a bit surprising. This is because the machine is also nicely priced and features a number of functions and capabilities not found in a printer in this price range.

From the time the first print task is designated until the time the first page emerges is only 17 seconds, which means that the supplied microprocessor (a QED 250 MHz model) is doing its work well. That microprocessor combines with a decent amount of standard memory to handle a large number of nearly simultaneous print jobs from all across the network, which is also an excellent capability found in the 8150dn.

As far as memory goes, the Hewlett-Packard comes with 32 MB of it, though that can be increased up to 160 MB of RAM quite easily. Assess the needs of the network or workgroup and how often it requires print jobs to be completed, as well as the size of those jobs, before making a decision about increasing RAM, because the chances are good that it probably won't be necessary.

Taken altogether, there's a great deal to like about the HP LaserJet 8150dn printer and very little to find to dislike. It has a great deal of features and capability, and it's nicely priced at about $600 for a new model, though plenty of refurbished and used ones can be found for around $200. Make sure to grab one as soon as it's available because it tends to be snapped up fairly quickly, which is a testament to its versatility and capabilities along with its durability.