The LaserJet Pro CP1025 is getting on a bit now, in technology terms, having been released in early 2013. It is, however, still going strong and obviously still makes enough for HP to warrant the line being kept alive.
The CP1025 is actually quite a small, compact colour laser printer, measuring 400 x 402 x 255 mm, which may appeal to those who are limited by desk space. It’s a USB-only connection, though, which limits its uses unless you opt for the optional wi-fi component or you get a little creative in the way you set it up on your PC.
It’s also quite a basic affair, lacking any sort of LCD information screen and having a rather poorly built flip-down front input tray, which can take 150 pages, the CP1025 seems to try and get by on its glossy blackand-white plastic looks.
On the inside, you have an HP-designed 264MHz RISC processor, along with 8MB of SDRAM and an additional 128MB flash memory module. The toner cartridges are fed in via a carousel setup, where the printer will rotate to the relevant colour and print to a transfer belt before printing to the page. Although this makes it quite easy to change toners, since you just select the colour from the control buttons on the righthand side of the printer and the printer rotates to the selected toner, it does make for a much slower printing speed.
In our text test, the average print speed was about 14 pages per minute. Colour came in at just three pages per minute. These number aren’t too far off the HP-stated specifications, and provided you’re not in a hurry to take the sheet from the printer, they’ll suffice for most users.
In terms of quality, the output from the HP CP1025 wasn’t all that great. It wasn’t terrible either, mind you, but it did lack a level of sharpness to the text that we’ve become accustomed to with more expensive printers. The colour prints too weren’t that impressive either and felt a little muted.
The cheapest we found the toners for came to £120.62, for a multi-pack black and three colour. The black cartridge had a yield of 1,200 pages, whereas each of the colour cartridges had just 1,000 pages in them. This equates to about 2.9p per page, which can became quite expensive over time, especially since you’re only getting a thousand pages out of the pack before you’ll have to replace them.
The HP CP1025 isn’t a totally awful printer. At £112 or thereabouts depending on where you shop, it’s a good price for a colour laser for the home. But as we’ve seen so far, with the Lexmark, you can have far better in terms of quality and overall cost. Based on that alone, it’s difficult to rate the CP1025 that highly.
No doubt, if you’re a diehard HP fan, then the CP1025 will be great. Otherwise we’d recommend you spend a bit more time shopping around.