Home > Consumer Reviews > HP LaserJet P1006 Printer

I love this printer, I bought it on sale over the weekend for under $100 (couldn't resist a laser printer at that price!). I probably printed about 700 pages this weekend, one of the perks of being a Grad student I suppose.

The Positives
-Prints quickly and great font quality
-The printer is SMALL, smaller than my injet.
-Works great with XP and Vista (sorry, No Mac to test on)

The Con
-This printer won't work with my wireless print server. The reason given is that the driver doesn't support it at this time. My workaround for the time being is to share the printer from the desktop in my office since I do most of my printing from my laptop in another room.

Hopefully that driver or a firmware upgrade to the print server (whichever comes first) comes out soon! Otherwise this is an incredible laser printer for the price!

On a side note, many people in discussion forums have complained about the high cost per sheet for a laser printer (about 4 cents a page), it is still far lower than any inkjet AND the printer just came out, as far as I've seen, Laser cartridges (at least here on Amazon) tend to fall in price by a few dollars after the product has been out for 6 or more months. I don't see this changing for this printer as well.

This printer shares a similar footprint with the Laserjet 1012 and 1022. Do not be fooled! It only has a half size (relative to the others with its form factor) toner cartridge, which costs exactly the same (effectively doubling your cost per page). There are issues where the printer will not print from Microsoft Office on the Mac (but those are are driver issues which will be eventually resolved). I hate feeling cheated, and I am very displeased that HP discontinued the other (full-size toner) printer line without telling the consumer they were getting only half as much for effectively the same price. Find a Laserjet 1012 or a 1022, if you still can, and let HP know that selling half as much value, in a full value size package, for a full value size price is not acceptable.

I'm very happy with the printer so far - it's actually exceeded my expectations. I bought it one week ago to use for occasional but very important printing - I'm in law school, and when I need something printed, I need it NOW. :-)

I've used many printers in the past and always had good experiences with HPs. I also currently own the HP Color LaserJet 2605dn Printer (Q7822A#ABA) which is a $400 color laser (which has been excellent). Finally, HP is an American company, so I was specifically looking for an inexpensive HP laser printer when I bought this. I realize that I could have gone with a Brother laser for around $100 or so, but I need absolute reliability - no compromises whatsoever.

The bottom line is that it met all my expectations - small, quiet and great B&W output for documents. I don't print much graphics, so I can't comment on that aspect. By the way, I'm using it with a new MacBook Pro, and there have been no problems.

The printer exceeded my expectation with respect to the speed. It seems to print very fast - nearly as fast as a larger office HP. Just my subjective impression - I haven't timed it with a stop watch.

The only possible negative is that I didn't find an instruction manual included. Not even on the CD-ROM. It may be that I overlooked it because I was in a rush to get going. But HP has an excellent support website where one can download drivers and manuals for all models, even very old ones. Further, the set up and install of the printer has been just like every other HP printer I've used.

I got this from another online vendor for sixty bucks, and consider it a great deal. You can't beat a laser printer for that price. It's fast, turns out decent quality pages, and works with most Windows versions. I bought it partly for the price and partly because it has drivers for Windows Server 2003, which is what my print server is running. I don't know where people are getting these "no drivers" complaints - it has drivers for any version of Windows from 2000 to Vista, and most recent versions of Mac OS X.

No, it can't compete with HP's workgroup lasers, but for the price, it's great. The only caveat I'd offer is the price of toner: it comes with a "starter" cartridge that's only half the regular size, and replacements cost as much as the printer itself. Looks like the cartridges last a while, though - I've printed a fair amount with it and haven't even used up the starter cartridge.

What a disappointment. Besides the fact that the cartridges cannot be purchased from the reman companies, the printer has proven to be very unreliable. I use Windows XP, and the ability to print comes and goes. The problem seems to be related to the HP Windows driver. Too bad HP has stopped selling the very reliable HP 1020 and 1022 models.