HP Color Laserjet CM2320fxi MFP Review - A Plum or a Prune? Reviewing Top Multi Function Printer Specs

HP Color Laserjet CM2320fxi MFP Review - A Plum or a Prune? Reviewing Top Multi Function Printer Specs
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HP LaserJet CM2320fxi MFP: A Complete Solution

The HP Color LaserJet CM2320fxi MFP is a color laserjet AIO, made by one of the best known names in the world of printers. Hewlett-Packard has put together a printer package that can be networked to serve a small company, with a duty cycle of 40,000 pages. HP.com is selling it at $900 USD, but it can be found online for as low as $740 USD. Its recommended volume is from 1000 to 2500 pages a month. It is a good sized piece of equipment, weighing about 77 pounds, and filling a 20” x 20 “ X 26” high spot in the office. The size is actually awkward however, too low to set on the floor, and far too tall to set on a desk; it needs a printer stand about the height of a low coffee table.

It is equipped for networking with built in Ethernet, a USB port, and slots for memory cards. You can print directly from the printer, and scan to your computer or to email - when the scanner is working! It is capable of printing, copying and scanning documents up to legal size (8.5” x 14”). It can handle practically any type of paper in a wide variety of sizes, envelopes, labels, card stock and transparencies, with two 250 sheet input trays as well as a 50 sheet multipurpose tray for manual feeding. The ADF can handle up to 50 sheets.

Both black and white and color printing are 21 ppm, with 600 x 600 dpi resolution for mono and 600 x 1200 for color. The copier runs at 20 ppm for both black and white and color copies, can enlarge to 400%, reduce down to 25%, and make up to 99 copies of a document. While this is not the fastest printing on the market, the printer can keep producing steadily until the job is done. This MFP is capable of automatic duplexing - a capacity that a lot of business owners value.

Black and three separate color cartridges are included and installed, rated for 1200 pages each. When new ones need to be purchased, the cartridges are rated at black, 3500 pages, and color, 2800 pages each, and can be found online for about $110 each, or directly from HP at about $120 with free shipping. A good deal is available on the black from HP, with a double pack, 7000 pages, for $175 USD. HP’s use of three separate color cartridges also eliminates wastage of your color ink. HP claims that color printing is as cheap as mono printing- a real break for smaller companies.

It scans at 1200 dpi, 19200 enhanced, and is supposed to be able to minimize the lines caused by scanning from a book, along with darkening or lightening the output as needed. Scanning can be done directly from the printer back to the computer or to email. The 2.4” LCD display on the printer has a neat PC free preview of output that can be viewed before printing or sending.

The fax is just as useful, holding up to 250 sheets in memory with a speed of 33.6 kbps. It also comes with full duplex faxing, fax forwarding, and even filters junk faxes, as well as having a six number speed dial and auto redial. Users seemed pretty satisfied with faxing capabilities and performance.

The printer can be used with numerous operating systems: Windows 2000, XP, Vista, Windows Server 2003, Novell Netware 3.2, 4.2, 5.x, 6; Red Hat and SuSE Linux 6.x or higher, Mac OS X 10.3 and higher, and more. This gives businesses a wider range of options than many more expensive network printers.

HP LaserJet CM2320fxi MFP: The Problems

It seems to be everything the busy home office or small business could desire - but the HP MFP user forum has a number of different threads of problems with the HP LaserJet CM2320fxi MFP. They range from a number of cases where the black toner was in a defective cartridge when the printer arrived; a problem which happened often enough that HP was replacing the defective cartridges when notified, to complaints that the manual feed resulted in crooked printing. Some printers suffered paper jamming as soon as they arrived, and others had duplex printing that resulted in 2 sided sheets of solid black. Not something that encourages good toner usage stats.

But the real issue with this MFP is scanner problems. There are many threads on the quality of the scans, the inability to scan from the printer back to the computer, and the inability to get the scanner functions working at all. Users also had trouble enabling the scan features if they previously had another HP printer installed, even after it had been completely uninstalled, and there was speculation that legacy software existed somewhere on their systems, resulting in the new scanner drivers not installing. While some users were able to scan documents successfully, the most common complaint overall was that the scanner took letter sized documents and scanned them into legal sized format, leaving a strip of white on every page. Frustrated owners fad to go into every scanned page individually and crop the scan to the correct size- a labor intensive job that was not appreciated. As of January 2009, these complaints seemed to still be unresolved, and one user wrote in the forum that the printer did not rate live support from HP. Other frustrated owners were not having any luck in the online troubleshooting guides or updates from HP.

A few other issues were mentioned, but they seemed to be more individual situations, probably resulting from a single faulty printer rather than a fundamental problem.

The HP Color LaserJet CM2320fxi does come with a one year limited warranty for parts and labor.

A certain number of the users complaining were considering returning their printer to HP and getting another model, or buying from another company entirely.

Conclusion (3 out of 5)

In conclusion, despite the reasonable cost per page and desirable features designed into the HP Color LaserJet CM2320fxi, I would recommend that interested buyers consider other multifunction printers or wait to purchase it until HP has solved the scanner issues plaguing users.