HP LaserJet Pro 400 M451 Toner Cartridges

HP M451 Printer Review

Designed for the small or medium office environment, the HP LaserJet Pro M451 serves as a solid office printer with upgrade options and affordable replacement toners. The base model offers only printing capabilities and standard USB and ethernet connections, but there are alternative models available that have a bit more to offer. The M451dn has duplexing and wired networking, the M451nw has wired and wireless networking support, and the M4512dw has both duplexing and wireless. The M451 MFP comes with scanning and copying functionality.

When it comes to speed, the M451 is average for a small-office color laser printer at 21 pages per minute, and that is for black-and-white documents as well as full color prints. Don't expect fast response time, however, as it takes about 17 seconds for the first page to begin printing once a task is sent. The maximum number of prints each month, or the monthly duty cycle, is 40,000 pages. HP recommends, however, that users average around 2,000 prints per month to ensure the longevity of the machine.

The cyan, magenta, and yellow HP M451 toner cartridges will yield about 2,600 pages each before the indicator light on the front panel will alert the user that printer toner is low. The black supply comes in two different sizes: standard and high capacity. The standard LaserJet Pro M451 toner cartridge yields up to 2,200 pages and the high-capacity version can produce as many as 4,000 pages before expiring. In terms of cost per printed page, the latter is more economical. Additionally, some third-party vendors offer remanufactured HP M451 toner, which often costs less than half as much as the OEM versions.

Both the memory and paper capacity are expandable on the M451, making it ideal for offices expecting to grow. The 128 MB memory will be sufficient for medium volumes, but as business picks up and more data is being sent each day, users have the option of upgrading the memory to 384 MB. The standard, built-in tray can hold up to 250 sheets, the bypass multimedia tray holds 50 sheets, and the output tray holds about 150 documents. An additional 250-sheet tray, which is sold separately, increases the total input paper capacity to 550 sheets.

The overall quality of the printed documents is not overly impressive, but certainly sufficient for a work environment. The maximum resolution that can be reached with the LaserJet Pro M451 toner is 600x600 dpi, which will bode well for text documents but may fall short when printing photos or colorful graphics. The end result is also contingent on the type of paper that is used, which ranges from envelopes to transparencies to glossy paper.

Though the M451 is, overall, a basic machine, the expandable features and upgraded model alternatives will attract a variety of office types and sizes. It is not an overly expensive machine to maintain, either, thanks to the availability of third-party HP M451 toner.