Jan 03, 2025 01:19 PM IST
A printer that’s well equipped, with impressive speed and quality of prints and built-in security features, urges balancing ease of use with operational costs making it best for workplace usage.
Printers weren’t this cool, at least till a few years ago. For homes, small businesses and pretty much any use-case there may be, there has always been a clear separation between the comparatively more affordable to buy and maintain ink tank (or inkjet, as you may recall them) printers and laser printers, depending on what they needed. The latter, considered more expensive due to costs in play (and continues to be so), is countering with a pitch of versatility and relevance. HP’s attempts with the LaserJet Pro MFP 3303sdw deliver on speed and reliability, but for small businesses, they’ll still be paying typical laser printer recurring expenditure.
Let’s talk costs. The price tag of ₹59,999 means home users are unlikely to spend as much for occasional, often casual print use-cases. The LaserJet Pro MFP 3303sdw uses four cartridges — black, yellow, magenta and cyan. Each of these cost between ₹7,300 and ₹8,500. How soon you must buy these, will depend on the number of prints, and the frequency. Important to note at this point, this laser printer is certainly more compact than many that went before it, and that footprint reduction hasn’t had any bearing on print performance, either quality or speed.
The reason I referenced costs first, is to illustrate how real-world usage pans out. I started out testing with all four HP TerraJet toner cartridges at 100%, and while the black cartridge estimated (this data is within the printer settings on the web or the HP Smart app) around 500 prints remaining, the three colour cartridges indicated around 400 prints more are on the agenda. Around 30 prints later, mostly black colour text with minimal visuals, the black cartridge estimate had reduced to around 300 prints remaining. While these estimates are never extremely accurate, they’re a more than helpful indicator.
The worrying thing was, Cyan, Magenta and Yellow dropped that estimates to just a further 50 prints before the cartridges need to be replaced. The level was down from 100% to 70% too, after this quick printing session. That’s something to keep in mind. Inarguably, the quality of prints is pristine, whether colour or black and white.
It must be noted that print speeds from the LaserJet Pro MFP 3303sdw, are really quick. On an average, it took 3 seconds for a normal quality colour print (a mix of text and visuals). By default, two-sided printing is enabled by default, which is a good thing — I haven’t noticed this behaviour in most printers tested recently. At that pace, you’re looking at an impressive 20 pages per minute, when time is of the essence, at work.
Another element of security that would be relevant for the workplace and the IT department, is the integration of HP Wolf Pro security suite, much like HP’s enterprise focused laptops. Apart from the IT being able to control and monitor the printer’s operation in the workplace environment, these dynamic security enabled printers only work with original cartridges (whether newly purchased, refilled or reused) that have a security chip integrated.
The HP LaserJet Pro MFP 3303sdw has a 4.3-inch touchscreen, which makes setting this up and controlling regular operations (connecting with Wi-Fi, firmware updates and print or scan commands) rather simple. The smartphone app adds to that convenience, particularly for scenarios where you may be printing from your mobile device on the same Wi-Fi network.
There’s little doubt the HP LaserJet Pro MFP 3303sdw printer is well equipped for what it is supposed to do, including the speed and quality of prints, ease of use and built-in security features. That said, there’s no denying the cartridges are expensive, and from our testing experience, you may run through the colour ones rather quickly too. For workplaces that need a printer that simply works for everyone in the workgroup, the HP LaserJet Pro MFP 3303sdw simply does that job without any inconvenience.
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