Office achiever of the month

The HP 4000TN is based on the popular HP LaserJet 5 series and reflects the company`s many-years` experience with laser printers. Powered by a 100MHz RISC processor and a new LaserJet 1200 dpi engine capable of churning out 17 pages per minute, the HP4000 targets big office environments and comes with all possible networking flavours.

The new HP 4000TN is the first HP printer in its category to come with a new super toner cartridge, which allows for 10000 pages. (The standard HP cartridge capacity is 3500 pages. We`d appreciate if somebody would care to collect more than a dozen cartridges that have piled up in our server room over the last two years.) Even better, the new cartridge contains ultra-fine toner with 5-micorn particles (HP claims this is less than one-half the size of most other toner brands).

The laser has a few other nice features, such as JetDirect interface, which allows the printer to talk directly with other JetDirect devices. This we weren`t able to try as our printer, sadly, had no one to talk to.

Considering that ITWeb is a typical online publishing company, it`s amazing how many hard copy pages our eleven-member team produces a day: web development and design departments in our micro-enterprise print proofs all the time, the sales team is constantly busy with proposals and client reports, and the ladies from accounts always have some invoices to print. Not to mention our developers who print every manual they can find on the Web!

Our current printing setup is based on a shareable LaserJet 5P printer attached to a Windows NT server which drives our more or less self-maintained local area network.

We don`t have a dedicated network administrator, and zero network management is a highly regarded feature for every new device we put on the LAN. Our small LaserJet 5P, bought in the days when ITWeb was a one man band, falls into that category - we haven`t switched the poor printer off in the last 18 months!

So we wondered if a dedicated network printer such as the HP4000TN would make any deference in printing speed and, especially, in our network bandwidth.

Equipped with HP`s JetDirect 600N print server, the 4000TN supports all types of Ethernet network environments, including Windows 95 and Windows NT, IBM OS/2 Warp, Novell NetWare and Unix, and several flavours of network protocols including DLC and TCP/IP.

Introducing a network printer to the other members of the LAN family is never an easy task. This printer comes with the pretty cool Web JedAdmin 2.5 software, which enables the network administrator to monitor and configure the printer remotely, via the Web browser. But, the advanced management software doesn`t help the initial setup very much.

In order to get off the ground, we had to roll the sleeves up and drill down through the menus on the control panel in order to assign a proper IP address to the printer`s network card from our network domain. After the TCP/IP setup is done, however, everything happens quite smoothly.

Although the 4000TN has a print server built-in, you`ll still need a file server to run management software off and to map workstations. Adding a new printer to a workstation is a simple enough task, but multiplied by eleven it could last for a while, and in large workgroup environments, I imagine, it`s not an amusing venture at all.

JetAdmin doesn`t provide automatic workstation setup, and to get it right you have to shuffle around a little bit with new printer drivers. We`d like to see on the HP a feature that Lexmark offers with its Optra product range - client software installs automatically on a workstation when the user selects the Optra printer. The user can do it himself - a network administrator doesn`t have to visit each Windows 95 machine individually.

Users don`t care about the technology as long as it works and brings the results, and from the user side the HP4000TN makes everyone happy.

With eleven people sharing one network printer, idling in the print queue is not a serious problem. Still, it is stress-relieving to know that with its 17 ppm print engine and instant-on fuser technology ready to print seconds after the cold start, the HP4000TN will typically finish the job by the time you walk to the printer.

In a multi-departmental office environment, such as ITWeb, printing jobs clash now and then, raising the temperature in the office. It happened more than once that our developers print their documentation on letterheads prepared for invoices, or that admin people print invoices on the already used paper.

HP comes with one 100-sheet tray and two 250-sheet trays so every department can now have its own dedicated try to use whichever paper it wants. Actually, HP comes with several options to enhance the HP4000`s paper handling capabilities, including a 500-sheet bin, a 75-envelope auto feeder, and a mechanism for duplex printing.

Printers can be judged by many features, but when it comes to printing documents other people have to see, printing quality is the only things that matters. The first HP printer ever with 1200 dpi output, the HP4000 produces sharp text, legible all the way down to 4 points, and stunning greyscales.

Along with its own native printing language, PCL - now already in version 6 - the HP4000 comes with a PostScript engine, which probably for the first time enables a laser printer to produces camera-ready artwork for desktop publishing purposes.

Traditionally, laser printers are used only for office documents and proofs - with the HP4000, you can do some serious desktop publishing.

In the early days of laser printing and desktop publishing revolution, in the Series II era, many vendors were offering 600 dpi, 900 dpi and 1200 dpi adapters for 300 dpi engines (I believe I still have one or two of them in my drawer). Why did it take Hewlett-Packard that long to get there?

Since we have used Hewlett-Packard laser printers for years, from a LaserJet Series II model, to the 4 and 5 series, the HP4000TN comes to us as a most welcome product evolution.

The only other thing we were sad about was that the HP4000 was too powerful for us. We have to grow our humble micro-enterprise quite substantially before we`ll be able to use the HP4000 at its full capacity.