HP's 1200d occupies a solid middle ground between typical inkjet printers and entry-level color laser printers. It offers some of the best features of both camps, at a price that is affordable for home, home office, or small business use.

Print heads and ink cartridges of the 1200d are separate, which saves you money when it's time to replace an ink color. The 1200d has four ink cartridges, in black, cyan, magenta, and yellow. The 1200d is larger than a typical inkjet printer, partly because it's built to handle larger print volumes, so be prepared to sacrifice a little extra desktop space.

The extra space is put to good use, however, because the 1200d supports black printing resolutions of up to 1,200X1,200 dpi and color printing resolutions of up to 4,800X1,200 dpi. It can handle the usual variety of paper stocks and sizes, including letter, legal, envelopes, labels and transparencies.

Overall print quality is good. Text is sharper than typical for an inkjet printer, although you may see some fuzziness with small font sizes. Color fidelity is average, and some banding occurs with photos and color graphics. This is not unexpected for a printer that's designed for business use rather than photo printing, but it's something to consider if you print many graphics-heavy business documents. Image quality is better if you choose the best-quality printing option, but you'll take a heavy hit in print speed.

Buttons on the front panel of the printer provide easy access to all printing controls, which is a better feature than you usually find at this range. A blinking light lets you know when an ink color is running low.

The 150-sheet capacity of the supplied paper tray is somewhat small for business use, but you can add a second, 250-sheet paper tray for $79. An automatic sensor can determine what type of paper is in the paper try and adjust print quality accordingly. You can also adjust print settings manually, which is good.

The Hewlett-Packard 1200d is a good choice if speed and relatively low per-page printing costs are more important than top-notch image quality.

Pro: Good text quality. Built-in duplexer. Above-average document printing speeds for an inkjet. Supports USB and parallel port connections. Low per-page printing costs for an inkjet.
Con: Image quality is average, and photo-printing speeds are a little slow. Text is sometimes a little fuzzy at small font sizes.

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Warranty
1 year limited