Hewlett-Packard Laserjet 3015

All-in-one or multifunction laser printers are an ideal choice for businesses looking to consolidate hardware purchases or even for homes with school or university students. The HP LaserJet 3015 All-in-One offers a blend of functions for a small office, including printing, faxing, scanning and copying, all rolled into a single device.

The gray and silver LaserJet 3015 stands 45cm tall, with an input paper tray sitting at the bottom beneath the output tray and a well laid out control panel with small screen on the top of the unit. There's no card reader, but this device is primarily aimed at a business market with little use for bells and whistles.

The LaserJet is designed to save office space and offers a small footprint of only 47 x 43 cm. HP has packed a lot of technology into the 3015's 10kg chassis. The input tray has room to store 150 A4 sheets and 10 envelopes, while the output tray can deal with 125 sheets and 15 envelopes. The scanner operates at an optical resolution of 600 x 600dpi, while the print engine can handle up to 600dpi (1200dpi optimized) using HP's photoRET technology. HP PCL 6, HP PCL 5e, and PostScript level 2 emulation are all included as standard, and the machine ships with 32 MB of RAM for handling print jobs. It also has the capacity to store up to 110 fax pages in memory, which can be handy if the device runs out of paper overnight or over a holiday.

One potential issue we found with the LaserJet 3015 is the use of an automatic document feeder to load pages into the scanner. It means that you can't use the device to photocopy pages from books or magazines, but it helps keep the cost and physical size of the machine in check.

The LaserJet 3015 is compatible with all versions of Windows from 98SE onwards and Mac OS 9.1 through 10.2. Included in the package is a rich list of software applications to cover scanning, faxing, optical character recognition (OCR), and setup and maintenance tools. In our testing, we recorded a print speed of 14 pages per minute in draft mode after a warmup period of 10 to 12 seconds. Black-and-white copies are reduced to 256 shades of grey, but this is generally no problem for office documents.

The LaserJet 3015 All-in-One is a solid, capable do it all machine suited to either a demanding home or small business, and HP backs it up with a one-year warranty. The scanner has its own limitations, but this shouldn't be too much of an issue unless you need to duplicate pages from magazines or textbooks.