First Look: HP LaserJet Pro 100 colour multi-function printer M175nw

Launched last week, HP's LaserJet Pro 100 Colour MFP M175 is HP’s smallest A4 colour multifunction laser printer.

Measuring 441 x 421 x 338mm, and weighing 18.8kg (34.8lbs), the M175 is aimed at small to midsize businesses, but would be useful in home offices too.

There are two models in the range, a base model (M175a) with just a USB 2.0 port to connect locally to desktops, and a network model (the M175nw), with a 10/100Mbit/s LAN adaptor along with an 802.11b/g/n wireless card.

We looked at the network-capable M175nw version [see picture].

We found that the M175nw offers very good colour reproduction.

Print resolution is 600 x 600 dots per inch (dpi), while the scanner resolution is 1200 x 1200 dpi. The front panel has a two-line 16-character monochrome LCD display [see picture].

Energy usage
The M175 models have the HP Auto-On/Auto-Off feature, which turns the printer off after a user-specified period, saving power.

The time it takes the printer to put the first page of a print job out (FPO) when the printer is in standby mode or Auto-Off mode were identical.

Smart Install
HP claims the Smart Install feature makes installing the M175nw easier and quicker. We've installed a lot of HP printers, and it can take more than 15 minutes to set them up and verify that printing over wireless connections works.

Smart Install overrides Windows and locates all the drivers on the printer, so no CDs are required, and nothing else needs downloading from www.hp.com. HP therefore claims a much quicker install time of just a few minutes.

Wireless printing
In addition to supporting standard wireless networks, the M175nw supports the relatively new Wi-Fi Direct wireless networking standard, launched in October 2010.

Wi-Fi Direct allows direct peer-to-peer wireless connections without having to go through wireless access points (APs), or having to get onto a wireless network.

Wi-Fi Direct has potential uses in a variety of businesses. For example, hotels with Wi-Fi Direct-enabled printers could allow guests to print documents – a boarding pass for instance – without having to log on to wireless networks with usernames and passwords.

Wi-Fi Direct is similar to Bluetooth, but has greater range and bandwidth, and can also use Wi-Fi Protected Setup (WPS). WPS is a system for easily setting up, and configuring Wi-Fi Direct-enabled devices to secure wireless connections.

However, at the time we looked at the N175nw, HP said that the Wi-Fi Direct feature was not yet available and users buying the printer now would have to firmware upgrade it to get the function.

The firmware should be available before September said HP, adding that all future LaserJet models, including SMB and enterprise printers, will feature Wi-Fi Direct.

The N175nw has HP's ePrint technology and is AirPrint-enabled. AirPrint is Apple's wireless printing tool – technology embedded in Apple's iOS operating system that allows iPad and iPhone users to print directly to printers. AirPrint also allows multiple print jobs, and users can manage their print queues directly from AirPrint.

We tried the feature, and were able to print off an email in less than 20 seconds [see picture].

EPrint is the HP service allowing users to print direct to ePrint-enabled devices from anywhere with network connectivity. It's like emailing the document you want printed to the printer.

ePrint-enabled printers are assigned a unique email address. Users send an email to the ePrint-enabled printer. The document is attached to this unique printer-specific email address, and the document prints after the email is picked up by the printer.

Specifications
The M175nw has a 600MHz ARM 11 embedded processor, and can have a maximum of 128MB of memory onboard. The monthly A4 duty cycle (maximum number of pages the printer should be allowed to print per month) for the M175nw is up to 20,000 pages, but duplex printing is manual only.

HP says the print speed for black and white pages is up to 16 pages per minute, with FPO up to 15.5 seconds. For colour copy, claimed print speed is up to four pages, with an FPO of 27.5 seconds.

The scanner can be used through HP's Scan software or can be driven by Windows TWAIN (technology without an interesting name), or WIA (Windows image acquisition)-compliant applications, while only TWAIN-compliant Mac programs can drive the scanner.

There is also Readiris optical character recognition (OCR) software supplied on a separate CD. This software is normally bundled with HP Document Management scanners, selected Photo scanners and HP's MFP hardware.

The copier function allows mixed, text and graphics to be processed with dedicated settings, and there's also an auto select function for when quality is not that important.

Copy resolution is up to 300 x 300 dpi on both black text and graphics and colour text and graphics.

Copy speed is up to 16 copies per minute (cpm) for black A4 documents, and 4cpm for colour documents, with the maximum number of copies being 99.

The copier can resize documents to 25 per cent or up to 400 per cent of the original size.

Conclusions
Print quality is good. Smart Install will make printer installs a lot easier, while Wi-Fi Direct will probably save a lot of helpdesk calls for usernames and passwords for on-the-fly printing.