Home > Consumer Reviews > HP Color Laserjet CP1215 Printer

PROS: low price, prints sharp and clean, quiet printing.
CONS: won't handle all paper stock. Warm-up time is 1-2 minutes.

I bought this printer to replace my 14 year old Hp LJ 4MP. I assumed the CP1215 would be capable of doing the same things my old one did and more in color.
My immediate need was to print out baby shower invites. The card stock was within the limits of HP's recommendations, no thicker than a 4x6 card. The printer would print 1 invite, then error out with "misprint". After 20 minutes of making sure I removed all the tabs and protectors that HP ships with and making sure this model supported 4x6 card stock, I found a way to get the rest of my stock printed. I had to press the resume button, causing it to reinitialize the warm-up sequence and then print. Took 30 minutes to do 30 invites.

This printer seems fine to print every day stuff. But if you print specialty paper, size and type, be aware it might not handle the paper well.

I bought this printer about a year ago to print labels for our home business. All our inkjet printed labels were fading too fast to sell our product. We got the laser printer and now our labels look great and professional. I've had no problems. I have printed labels, party invitations, pictures, etc. on label paper, cardstock and regular paper. Everything looks great and professional. Very easy to use printer. Also, I am still using the original toner cartridges that came with it. I just ordered a new black cartridge but I probably won't have to replace it for another week or two. The color cartridges are still at 50% so they will last a while longer. I'm very happy with this printer.

I ordered the printer from Amazon; shipped and rec'd in good time and condition. Directions to setup simple and straight forward.

Thought I was done. Started back to work, printed some docs with some color diagrams. Particularly the imagery was blury, almost as if they had shadows. Uhg, open and read manual; no help. Call HP customer support; now to their credit, "Bob" was helpful and patient. Patient because he explained my printer needed calibrating; 3 times worth. Then download and install latest firmware; oh, and calibrate 2 more times. Each calibrations cycle seemed to last 2 or 3 minutes; but I wasn't timing it. Printed off some test pages, good, problem solved or so I thought.

Next came this "spooler subsystem app" error. Uhg, what is this; google find out it's a .dll problem; going to require regedit. Ah no, I'm going to take a short cut and restore xp to yesterday setting so I can get back to work. Nope, that won't do it. Mind you, I can't print off the directions either. [..]

Follow the instructions, reinstall printer. What do you know, it works again. Folks it just shouldn't be this hard. I thought I was going to alleviate these problems by buying HP? Maybe next time.

So I've printed 100 pages or so now and for the money, I'm satisfied with the results. Would I recommend to a friend, reluctantly...

I have a Vista OS and the software was surprisingly easy to install, considering Vista doesn't make anything easy. I've used the printer to print a variety of documents. The clarity is great. I'm glad I got a color laser instead of another deskjet. Time will tell how long the cartridges last. 2 negatives: the footprint is much larger than I expected and it is slow. The end result is worth it, though. I wish the cartridges were a little less expensive, but I guess that's the price one pays for flexibility. In the long run, I believe this printer will be more cost effective than a deskjet.

Wow, Amazon is selling this at a great low price and I am very happy with what I got. This printer is my first laser and color to boot and is very impressive in terms of the quality of graphics and text output. The printer comes with enough ink to print out 750 pages at normal mode printing. Then the cartridges are spendy but will have enough ink for 1400 pages for full cartridges (2200 pages for the black cartridge). There are 4 cartridges required for the printer, each costs around $65 each.

I think this will be far cheaper than ink printers when taking a long term view. One neat feature is the printer software is well designed and shows you exactly how many pages each cartridge has left remaining before the ink is depleted.

Very quiet when printing and the quality is great, however the printer itself is quite hefty and surprised me at how big a footprint it turned out to have. Make sure you have a big space for this printer. Also, the printer occasionally makes a noise like it is resetting or something, not unpleasant or anything but keep in mind its not totally silent all the time when not working.