HP LaserJet Pro 100 M175a review

While most printer manufacturers, such as Epson, seem to be trying to make their business inkjets look more like laser printers, HP appears to be doing it the other way around. The LaserJet Pro 100 closely resembles the Officejet inkjet range, with a curved case and prominent 35-page ADF. This is a good thing, as previous LaserJet MFPs have been rather ugly. Build quality is sturdier than most its inkjet siblings, too.

The M175a is designed to take up as little space as possible, so the toner cartridges are loaded into a rotating caddy. The lid has to be shut while the caddy rotates, so changing a full set of cartridges involves a lot of opening and closing. Although the LaserJet 100 doesn’t have a colour screen an fancy interface, a bank of buttons and a mono LCD make it easy to copy documents and send scans to a PC.

Mono text prints are pin-sharp, as you’d expect. Colour prints are detailed, have accurate colours and are smoothly shaded. The toner doesn’t have the glossy finish we’ve seen from some colour lasers, but its prints look great on even thin, poor-quality printer paper. This is an advantage over most inkjets, which require a minimum of 80gsm paper to avoid wrinkling due to moisture from the ink. On the other hand, although the Pro 100 had a decent stab at printing our test photos, the results are never going to be something you’ll want to frame and put up in the sitting room.

The M175a is certainly fast enough when it comes to mono printing, at 12.4ppm. As it’s a four-pass printer, paper has to be sent around the engine four times for full colour. This limits speed to a comparatively slow 3.5ppm, but that’s still faster than all but the speediest business inkjets. Unfortunately, colour costs are painfully high at 18.5p for a mixed black and colour page. Even a page of mono text costs 3.8p – a figure that’s high when compared to almost any inkjet.

The 1,200×1,200dpi scanner and its driver are identical to those used by most of HP’s other MFPs. It has been overhauled to make scanning more efficient. It’s still very restrictive, though, limiting you to a handful of preset resolutions and providing few image processing or correction features. You can’t disable auto-sharpening, either, which leads to artefacts around areas of fine detail at high resolutions.

There was also vertical banding caused by the movement of the scan head at higher resolutions, and contrast is poor. Scan quality is acceptable at lower resolutions, at least, and 300dpi is more than enough for most office jobs. Colour and mono copies were good, with accurate colour reproduction and balanced greyscale tones.

The LaserJet Pro 100 is a relatively inexpensive laser MFP, and we were pleased with the speed and quality of its prints. However, it’s very expensive to run if you want to print a lot of colour, and we weren’t impressed by its flawed scans. Although it has plenty of features, most small and home office uses will be better off with a business inkjet MFP. The outstanding Epson WorkForce Pro WP-4535 DWF costs £60 more, but it’s much cheaper to run and provides better all-round quality.