By Adli Yashir, a correspondent with Berita Harian who has been reviewing printers since 1998

HERE is a quiet, ordinary-looking mid-range laser monochrome printer that lets its speedy print performance do the talking.

In the office, the HP LaserJet P2055dn can easily satisfy the needs of a small-sized workgroup or a personal assistant.

There are no horror stories where setup and installation are concerned. It was a painless 10 minutes to get the machine up and running.

A standard model comes with a 150-sheet output bin at the top and a 250-sheet paper tray at the bottom. It also comes with auto duplex - which lets you print on both sides of the paper automatically.

The front part of the printer opens to reveal a 50-sheet input tray for special media like cards and envelopes. A simple control panel on the right side of the printer serves as the central operations hub.

A small monochrome screen displays up to two short lines of text, telling you, for instance, when the printer is ready to print or when there is a paper jam.

At the heart of the print engine room is a 600Mhz processor and 128MB (384MB max) of memory.

What you get ultimately is a reliable and speedy workhorse for printing typical office documents.

This printer is quick off the starting block. From idle, it takes just 10 seconds before the first print appears. At normal print setting of 600 x 600dpi, the printer spits out 33 pages per minute.

Print quality is decent for an entry level monochrome printer. Looking at my test prints, toner spread was consistent on large 34-point fonts. Smaller six-point fonts are also evenly spread, making even small text easy to read. However, there are instances when text overlaps. For example in the word "RE:", the Arial Black font of the letter "E" looked fused to the symbol ":".

Final say

There are no bells and whistles in this printer but it gets the job done quickly.

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