Best Monochrome Printers for Different Purposes for Business or Home Users

Best Monochrome Printers for Different Purposes for Business or Home Users
Page content

Black and white printers have come a long way from the time of the dot matrix printers with their unappealing design and extremely slow performance. This is the age of sleek high performance laser black and white printer models that are easy on the pocket too. Unless you need to print pictures and various other colored pages, you don’t need a color printer, which is expensive to buy and maintain. For basic home and office needs a good black and white printer will comfortably suffice. So, which black and white printer should you go for? Let’s take a look at some of the best of various options available on the market today!

For larger businesses and offices with high volume printing, consider these options.

The HP Laserjet P4515x (HP Laserjet) is undoubtedly one of the best mono laser printers out there today. It is an able companion for any office that has medium to high volume printing requirements. The print speed is really impressive on this printer, which can easily manage 64 ppm, offering excellent line density at the same time, which translates to high quality printing. The extremely effective security features that this printer offers, such as PIN access printing, also make it ideal as a workgroup computer. It gives an impressive monthly duty cycle of up to 275,000 pages. The bulky size of this printer and its high price which retails around $2129 may deter you from buying it, but for those that can afford it and need a printer that combines blistering performance with excellent quality, look no further.

Another impressive workhorse from the HP stable is the HP LaserJet P3005x (HP Laserjet p3005x). Here are some numbers to justify the workhorse tag. This printer can handle a whopping monthly cycle of 100,000 pages. The print speed is 35 pages per minute and the P3005x impresses with its high quality printing. Another feature worth mentioning is the support for automatic duplexing standard. The embedded web server can send alerts and status update mail to a specific email address. Setting up security and network configurations is also quite simple, making it a secure printing solution in a workgroup environment. However, the P3005x is quite bulky and expensive as well. It retails for around $1000. The only gripe with this model seems to be that there is no way to properly attach the additional cassette tray without some minor assembly. Nevertheless, the HP LaserJet P3005x is a very good printer offering quality and performance.

Now for those without those big pockets or high volume needs, let’s take a look at two good budget black and white printing options.

Canon’s Laser Shot LBP 3100B (Canon) is one of the most popular mono printer options in the budget segment, providing decent performance while being easy on the pocket as well. It sports a sleek black design that is sadly marred by an unsightly black opaque paper output tray. This printer allows the user to choose to have either single or dual input trays, allowing for higher paper capacity and the use of two types of printing media, though there is no way to manually determine which tray to use. The Laser Shot LBP 3100B offers decent printing speeds of 16.6 ppm and also gives clean print quality, but which can be slightly inaccurate at times. It is priced only at $149. One single cartridge will give you up to 2,000 A4 pages printed.

The HP Laserjet P1005 (HP Laserjet P1005) is also a good budget option delivering good print quality and a slightly slower print speed of 15 ppm. It is extremely low priced and retails for just $129. It has a monthly duty cycle of up to 5000 pages and delivers decent print quality, with the first page out in less than 9 seconds. Though it’s not a high performer with stunning quality printouts, it’s an extremely efficient and reliable companion for basic home and small office text printing needs.