The economical HP LaserJet 1020 printer looks to be designed by the company to be applicable to the needs of most home office users who have a once in a while print job but nothing too out of the ordinary. It delivers good quality text printing and its overall cost per page is nice and low, owing in part to its retail price. It's one of a number of 1000-series printers offered by Hewlett-Packard.
In particular, this laser jet printer offers its services in monochrome and at a fairly decent print speed of 14 pages in a minute. This is about par for the course for a unit at this price point and in this particular market segment. Keep in mind that the 1020 looks to be mainly for use as a personal printer and not an office-typewriter and there should be little to fuss about over print speed.
The 1020 can be hooked up easily to a PC via its attached USB connection port, which is the only method available to hook up the machine to a computer, as a matter of fact. It's not Mac-compatible, as well, so remember that if finding a low-priced black-and-white laser jet printer for one of Apple's computers is the aim. There are other HP printers in the lineup that are suitable for that particular role.
When it comes to the print quality that the 1020 is capable of producing, it's more than acceptable at 600 dpi resolution. It also will emerge from the printer and fairly rapid order, with the first printed page coming out in about 10 seconds after the print job has been sent from the computer to the printer. HP includes one of its image enhancement technology suites to keep print product looking good.
The only onboard memory available with the 1020 is 2 MB of RAM, but that's because the computer it's attached to will handle most all of its printing processes. A 234 MHz processor is included by Hewlett-Packard to ensure that all of these print jobs are handled quickly and efficiently and in order to get that print task output down to that very-nice 10 seconds.
In terms of the kinds of media stock that 1020 can print out on, the variety is certainly wide enough and includes business card stock as well as labels, plain paper and envelopes along with transparencies. It stores about 150 sheets in its auto load input tray and it has a durability of about 5000 pages per month maximum duty. This is actually a fairly robust number for a small personal printer.
The 1020 uses a single black laser toner cartridge, and it can make good use of a variety of different Windows-based operating systems. This includes Windows ME as well as windows XP and XP Professional. Additionally, Hewlett-Packard Supplies the 1020 with a one-year warranty that can be stretched out past the time for payment of a small fee. It looks to be a durable little printer in the Hewlett-Packard lineup.
