HP LaserJet Pro 200 color MFP Printer Review - M276nw

Buy it on Amazon - http://lon.tv/69prt (affiliate link) VIDEO INDEX:

00:09 - Hardware overview
01:41 - Toner cartridges and installation
03:08 - Paper capacity
04:00 - Printing demonstration
04:41 - Touch screen display demonstration
05:27 - Scanner demonstration
07:09 - Web control panel demonstration
09:55 - Conclusion and final thoughts

This is a very capable color laser printer with excellent print quality. But it's hobbled by a very limited paper capacity and a lack of a manual feeder for printing envelopes, small cards, etc. The paper capacity is the biggest head scratcher as there is clearly room for a larger paper tray that would double its capacity. Expect to get maybe 150 sheets of thin paper loaded in at a time, far less with thicker higher quality paper.

Print quality is excellent with sharp text and very crisp graphics. I always recommend color laser printers over ink jets for business users as laser is far better for printing proposals, charts, and other business graphics. I've also found laser printers, especially those made by HP, to be much more reliable than ink jet printers. Consumable costs are high, about $300 to replace all four cartridges. Expect to get about 1500-1800 prints per cartridge but your mileage will vary greatly based on what you're printing and how much toner coverage your documents require per page.

The printer will not duplex documents automatically. You'll need to flip the paper over in order to get two sided prints.

I do like the scan options available. It was very easy to scan directly to my WD My Cloud NAS device as well as set up the printer's built in SMTP client for sending scans via email. It also supports SSL for outgoing email so it should work fine with Gmail and other email providers. The scanner isn't very fast but it's adequate for small sets of documents. It certainly won't rival high speed scanners that HP, Fujitsu and Epson make for small offices. It also doesn't duplex automatically - documents have to be fed through the scanner twice if they are two sided.

It has a very nice interface on the included touch screen. The web based control panel is very feature-rich with plenty of analytics and configuration menus. The HP "apps" are interesting but are really just means of downloading and printing documents from websites.

The printer is fully compatible with Android and iOS devices, so it's easy to print from a mobile device. It also comes with built in Ethernet, Wifi, and a USB port for a direct PC connection.

HP knows how to make good printers and this one certainly lives up to the brand. But I am disappointed with the limited paper capacity and the omission of a manual feeder.

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Disclosure: I received this product through the Amazon Vine program to review on Amazon's site.

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Closed Caption:

everybody's lon siphon and this is
probably the biggest item I've ever had
on the desk here this is the HP laserjet
pro color 200 m FP and this is a
multi-function color laser printer that
is fairly robust on the software side
and is not all that expensive i think
it's around three or four hundred
dollars and you get a full-blown color
laser printer so let's take a look at
the hardware first and then we'll step
through some other features so I'll get
into a little bit more detail on the
screen with my little camera here but
this is it is rather large you've got a
flatbed scanner on the top of the paper
output comes out from underneath the
scanner so you have a big open area here
in the middle
I connects to your network with Wi-Fi or
ethernet and you can also connect it
directly with a USB cable is well it
comes with the USB cable but you'll need
to provide your own internet cable if
that's how you choose to connect to it
it's got a USB port on the front so you
can print pdfs and photos directly and
you know when the reasons why you would
choose a color laser printer over an
inkjet is really not for photos but you
know for business documents things like
business graphics graphs charts you know
promotional materials
what's nice about a laser printer is
that you get very sharp text in all
color and that is really why you would
look at this i also like and actually
prefer having color laser printers for
office use because I don't print color
all that often but when I do I need it
to be perfect and I needed to work when
I needed to work and i found my inkjet
printers and often would clog up on me
because i didn't use them all that often
so laser just a little bit more reliable
and the consumable cost is slightly less
although as you'll see here on the toner
cartridges are not all that large on
board so you only get about eighteen
hundred pages per unit per color
cartridge here so it depends on the
coverage so if you're doing things with
really large coverage like one of the
things about the printout
I will be a large coverage kind of item
and that will get less toners these
cartridges are not all that big they're
rather small so they're not going to
hold all that much toner
I to replace all the toner at once is
about three hundred dollars so you won't
do that on here because obviously there
are different colors and you're going to
go through
different colors depending on how much
you print so for example the stuff that
i usually print is heavier on the yellow
then it is on on the cyan so I tend not
to replace the cyan as much as the
yellow I you know go so it's going to
vary based on what your printing but if
you are printing things that are really
giving you a lot of coverage you're
going to have to i probably paid more to
operate it at that point you might want
to look at a printer that's a little bit
larger may be designed for higher volume
kind of work this one they say is really
for a small office of one to five people
and they really kind of crippled some of
the features on here so you'll notice
when I pulled down the toner cartridge
day here there's no manual feed her so
if you wanted to print out cards or
envelopes and still have paper loaded up
you can't do it on here because there's
just no manual feed your only option for
paper is down here and you you could put
envelopes and paper and smaller pieces
of paper in here but it's really not all
that can be in to do and the other thing
that I noticed with it is that there
isn't all that much it by the way of
paper capacity so as you can see here i
think you could probably you know barely
get like half a ream of paper and what's
odd is that there's another door here so
it's almost like there's more room for a
larger paper tray they just chose not to
give you one
and I don't think there is an accessory
you can get to extend that capacity so
that was kind of a disappointment that
the paper handling i think you know if
thin paper you'll be lucky to get maybe
200 250 sheets of thicker paper
especially when you want to print a nice
color laser document
you're not going to fit all that much
probably will under 200 sheets of paper
so let's take a look though and see how
it prints i'm going to go over to my
macbook here and hit the print button
and let's see how fast this will print
out now what happens is too is that
these printers are often limited by
their memory this has 256 megabytes of
memory on board which sounds like a lot
for a printer but I really isn't all
that much so what'll happen is it'll
probably print out one page and then
kind of weight before it prints the
second one so we'll see what happens
as you can see kind of in the corner
here I've got a lot of coverage on this
document so you'll just see what we're
going about to print out here as it
comes out so let's go see the printer
speed it says it prints 14 pages per
minute in color and it seems to be a
little bit slower than that
as I'm watching it here but we'll see
rolling to print four pages and as that
comes out we can take a look at the
quality actually I'm as the first time
I've seen a print this is very nice i
have another HP color laser printer
upstairs is a little bit designed more
for larger office use and I i think this
quality is better on here this is really
sharp very very sharp printing on it
now one thing I do like is that it has a
very robust touch screen on the front
here it's got a lot of different options
you can control the USB over here
I'm you can scan and what's nice about
the scanner and i'll show you a little
bit more with this in a few minutes is
that you can scan directly to a USB
Drive in the the port here
you can also scan to a network folder
over your network so I've got mine
configured to send documents to my WD My
cloud
you can also scan directly to email
without a pc so you can do
smtp directly from the printer now all
the options for configuration are also
available on the web control pain I'm
going to briefly go through that in a
few minutes but you can see you can kind
of do a lot of basic controls here you
know maybe set up a copy
get all that going it's got a nice set
of options on here
they also have apps which really are
just ways to download documents from the
web to the printer to print out there
are a couple of ways to initiate a scan
you can do it right from the control
panel here and what this will do is
default to whatever settings you have
already pre established in the web based
control panel so I have my WD My cloud
set up i can scan right to that network
attached storage device
i did find it was a little bit slower
scanning from this to a network device
and it was using a computer to scan so
the scan speed was the same but the data
transfer took a little bit longer for
some reason so we're going to actually
pull up my mac here and you can see
exactly how you do it with the software
so this is a little piece of software
called HP scan that comes with it and
we'll just click scan we've got our
documents loaded up and i want to show
you some stuff here because you can set
it up to you know a couple different
modes of scanning and one of the things
that was interesting was that it says
scan both sides of a page and it will do
that but it doesn't duplex it
automatically so you have to go through
and scan and then flip the pages over
and then scan again so it doesn't really
have a true duplexer on board which is
what a lot of those other scanners do
have so be advised you'll need to flip
it over by the way the same goes for
printing as well so you can have to do
that on the printing site as well so I
just click continue
to start scanning and we'll see what
happens here as you can see it scans at
it ok right it's not terribly fast but
it's going to stop here as the computer
begins to process on what it just
received so you can see we've got a
document scanned in
it's going to process it and then it's
going to do the next document so not the
fastest thing in the world but certainly
adequate for getting your documents
ingested but i would not replace or
consider this a replacement for a
high-speed office scanner that would do
a much better job
the last thing i want to show you was
the web based control panel this is a
little built-in web server that the
printer has and you can configure I
pretty much everything you would do from
the the touch screen you can do on the
web browser and I think it's a lot
easier to work with the web browser then
it is the touch screen so i would
recommend
I you know getting the printer setup
with the web because it'll save you a
lot of time and was nice too is that the
web browser gives you a ton of data and
a lot of granular statistics about how
many potential pages you have left on
the cartridge when it was installed how
many pages were printed with this
particular cartridge do you also get a
sense as to you know perhaps which
colors you're printing the most of it
also has the ability to spy on your
co-workers not to see what they've
printed per se but to see how often they
have printed color and that's kind of a
use it a useful thing to see if someone
is abusing their color privileges
there's also you know a ton of different
you know reports that you can print out
of there from you as far as
configuration and supply status and all
that sort of stuff HP printers have long
had those kind of reports on there now
it's really cool out is a lot of stuff I
could go through and bore you with your
but what I did like was the fact that
there is a really nice address book
system here so you can setup your
network folders so here is an example of
how I print to my my course can't buy my
cloud which is the network attached
storage device on my network
you just type in its address here and
added an extra set of backslashes not
sure why but it is working so it's fine
what's cool is that you can set up a pin
number so you know you can prevent
people from scanning into a certain
folder if you don't want them too so
they have to type in a pin number first
before that that scan would go through
which I thought was pretty neat
and then of course you can set the
default scan settings likewise you can
also set up your email addresses in here
too so you can set up
outgoing email profiles with diff
an email servers so you type in the smtp
server you can use you know something
like a gmail server it also supports SL
so when a lot of those services like
Gmail require that now i like to use
something called mandril which is a
service from mailchimp that lets you
send 12 thousand emails a month for free
off their smtp servers I don't think
you're gonna be doing 12,000 scans a
month and that might be a very easy
option and then once you set up the
outgoing email profile you can set up
addresses that you want to frequently
email to you can pretty much treat this
like a fax so a couple of things just
mentioned in passing it does have fax
capabilities send and receive
so you can do that and it will also
support printing from mobile devices
like iOS devices and android tablets
using their internal printing protocols
one thing know if you have a mac and
this is an important point when you go
to set it up
it's going to default to the air print
driver which is but you don't want so
you want to go to HP and download its
drivers and when you go to configure the
printer make sure you select the HP
driver and not the air print driver
because the air print driver does not
have all the functionality
you know setting quality levels and that
sort of thing that I the HP driver has
so overall I think it's a good printer
it certainly robust although they have
crippled it by not having the ability to
do a manual paper feed I i really find
that to be an important thing you know
you probably use it more than you think
except for that little index cards
sometimes and I want to print an
envelope quickly without having a no
paper out so it i think it would have
been nice to have that ability to do a
manual paper feed also the paper the
paper capacity just isn't all that great
i don't know why they didn't have any
kind of left his big open door here and
and not give you that full tray of paper
that you can at least or a half a ream
of paper you can barely get a quarter
room into it as its configured and
there's no way to add more so I thought
that was a bit of a disappointment as
well but the print quality is excellent
really really nice print quality and I
just didn't really start messing around
with the settings either i just did the
default and I'm really happy with the
color and the sharpness there as well so
if you're looking for an inexpensive
laser printer and you're not doing all
that much printing this is probably
something worth considering and I would
choose this over an inkjet especially if
you're you're getting into the three or
four hundred dollar range for your
budget
laser printer is going to be a lot
better of a choice for you
you I think in a small office
environment than an inkjet this is lan
Simon thanks for watching
yeah