Hands on: I tried the HP LaserJet Pro MFP 4302fdw – read why it disappoints

HP’s LaserJet Pro MFP 4302fdw looks like the perfect color laser MFP for a small office. It’s a four-in-one with fax, topped off by a 50-sheet ADF. Both this and the printer are duplex-capable, so you can start a multi-page double-sided copy and go off to put the kettle on.

This MFP has virtually no packing to remove – you can just load up paper, join it to a network and install the drivers. Unfortunately, that didn’t go as smoothly as it should have. The touchscreen didn’t confirm whether the 4302fdw had joined our Labs network, and it didn’t respond when we repeatedly tried to print a network report. Shortly afterwards the printer sprang into life, delivering several unwanted copies.

We still don’t love HP’s TWAIN scan software, which in this case doesn’t offer 150dpi, but its MFPs’ lipless scan platens make it so much easier to retrieve your originals. This is quite a fast scanner, managing a 10 x 15cm photo at 600dpi in just 17 seconds, but it repeatedly dropped out midway through our 1,200dpi test.

If it’s been idle for a while, the 4302fdw needs only about three seconds extra to warm up before delivering a first black or color page. From standby it managed this in 17 seconds, and went on to deliver our 25-page test in exactly a minute. It was slower on our challenging color test, but its 14.4ppm still compares well at this price.

At 1.5p in black or 8p per color page this isn’t the cheapest laser to run, but you can sign it up to HP’s Instant Ink toner delivery, which brings the cost down as low as 1.3p. Unfortunately, you can’t do much about the 4302fdw’s indifferent print and scan quality. Black text was perfect, but graphics and photographs had a blue bias, apart from skin tones, which tended to look flushed. Office scans were perfectly good, but with photos we noticed a loss of detail from the darkest areas.

It’s a shame. The LaserJet Pro MFP 4302fdw should be the perfect small office device, but its results are just a little too weak.

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