» HP LaserJet 1320 Laser Printer

HP LaserJet 1320 Laser Printer Reviews

Customer Rating:
Summary: Great Little Box
Comment: I've been using HP LaserJets since the 5L in the mid 90's; this is my fifth in the series. The 5L, 6L, and 1130 used vertical paper storage and output and were very easy to do odd singles like envelopes, cards, etc. However, particularly on the 1130, they would go bad with time by starting to feed multiple pages through and then jam. HP even, with the 1130, sent out a stupid little 'fix kit' to try and remedy the problem, along with a $70 credit toward another of their printers.

Why did I keep buying HP? They were mechanically bulletproof, and supplies are so easy to fine. I didn't want some funky brand that I had to order cartridges online. The 1220 used a different design altogether and worked well, but felt flimsy, particularly with a plastic paper tray and cover that came detached far too easily. Like the 1130 I bought, I purchased the scanner option that quit immediately after the warranty period.

I got my 1320 for 50% off in an Office Max sale, a couple of years ago. I have had absolutely no problems with it. Unlike its predecessor, the paper tray is completely built in so its footprint is a little over a foot square. I print hundreds to thousands of pages of financial documents monthly--I have never had a jam, never. I just plop the paper in the tray and go to work. I seldom do regular #10 envelopes with it, so I can't evaluate that. I know there is a straight-path option on it, but virtually never need that, not with regular old paper. My copies come out crisp and extremely legible even with tiny text. I will occasionally produce pie charts and/or bar graphs with this machine and see little banding. It's fairly heavy, but I've actually put it in the back seat of my company car and hauled it to various places to use. It does have recessed places in the side to hold it. I never had problems installing the drivers on my laptops, either.

What's the downside? For the first time with one of my LaserJets, this one uses toner cartridges with a chip in them. When you reach a certain number of copies it's just not going to copy any more, whether your toner is empty or not. A lot of my pages have just a small amount of text on them and I know I'm not getting the full toner allocation used up. On the older LaserJets, once printing got a little spotty, you could take the cartridge out and shake it some and get at least a couple of hundred more copies. I use the larger 'X' cartridges because they're more economical. I also use a toner-refilling store and save a considerable amount over new toner cartridges, while saving environmental waste.

Would I buy it again? You bet. I just purchased an HP Color LaserJet to do pages in color when I need it, but am keeping this one also for the 90% of my work that is monochrome. It's less expensive on this printer. And, of course, with laser printing there's no worry about smearing with highlighters, or coming out with wet pages like inkjets.

---

Customer Rating:
Summary: beware new mac computers...not compatible...
Comment: Does not work with new Photoshop.
If you have CS3, this printer is obsolete.
2 hours on the phone with bad customer service and all they said was they dont work with the new systems. Many HP printers suffer the same incongruities.
Not useful for the future.

---

Customer Rating:
Summary: Tired of inkjet printers...
Comment: After using inkjet printers for some time, converted over to laser.
What can I say about HP Laser printers? This one is quick enough for our printing needs and saves us a ton of money on paper costs.

Attached to a printer server unit this printer is a non-event. Never jams, is fairly conservative on toner usage and simply prints clean, double sided pages time after time. Adding paper and a toner cartridge change is the only touching we have done.

Perfect for our printing needs.

---

Customer Rating:
Summary: Excellent Printer and Value for Home or Small Office
Comment: I bought the non-network version of this printer for my law office last January (2007) to use as my personal printer for e-mails and documents under 30 pages. I was a little nervous, based on some of the negative reviews here, but this printer has performed like a champ. Pages come out of this printer about as rapidly as any I've ever used (even "byte-intensive" PDFs and TIFFs), the print quality is excellent for text and graphics, the footprint is nicely compact, the controls are easy and intuitive, and the printer manager software that comes with it (where you can see how much ink you've got left in your cartridge, how many pages you've printed with the cartridge, etc.)is handy and helpful. The "starter" cartridge that came with the printer said it would print only about 1,000 pages. Wrong: I got almost 2,500 clear, crisp pages. I now use recycled/reloaded cartridges now at about $110 bucks a pop, and I got months of daily use out the first one of these I used when I replaced the "starter". Manual feed is not as precise as I'd like, but it's more than acceptable. The light grey/dark grey color scheme makes it attractive and professional for an office. And it's relatively quiet. It does the job for me very nicely.

---

Customer Rating:
Summary: Mediocre at best
Comment: Okay for printing on 8.5 x 11 paper. Standard input tray does not work for paper narrower than 8.75 inches wide. Paper guides on multipurpose input slot do not stay put, making it very difficult to print straight on other sizes of paper.

---

More Reviews for HP LaserJet 1320 Laser Printer