HP LaserJet Operates Slowly

[gamblingman]

So our office bought a bunch of HP LaserJet Pro 400 color Printer M451nw printers. These things do a good job at what they print, but they are exceedingly slow. Anytime you start printing they run a warm up, and if youre printing more than about 5 pages they re-run what sounds like a cleaning pass or warm up.

Like typical for an office someone bought them without asking anyone with tech knowledge if they would be acceptable for what we typically print. We tend to print large amount of materials, usually all black and white and these printers are just unacceptable for what we need, but theyve been bought so thats what we have to work with.

I am trying to find a way to speed up the printing and keep them form constantly running so many cleaning, warmup cycles. I tried looking iinto firmware updates but its got the most recent version. I also looked into adjusting other parameters coded into its settings, but they are all held proprietary and I'm not trying to dig into their software and end up dorking it up... that would look bad!

 

[voyagerfan99]

You're gonna be SOL. Color printers, no matter what make you go with, tend to have long and frequent warmup cycles.

My office has a dinosaur Color Laserjet 4550. It's boot and warmup cycle is 10 minutes, and each time you want to print something, it runs through a 5 minute calibration cycle.

 

[gamblingman]

It's boot and warmup cycle is 10 minutes

I'll bring the baseball bat and find an empty field... you bring the printer! Seriously 10 minutes?!

The best I've done is to enable the "eco" mode, grey scale and only black/white printing on them and it helped a little. I forgot to mention the ink reminder! That stupid ink reminder is driving everyone insane, at about 20% it start prompting you to "buy more hp toner!", it holds up the printing queue by forcing you to hit "continue for another 50 pages" all the time and screen popups. Its impossible to get rid of the reminders because its built into the firmware!!! It wouldn't even be so bad except that it doesn't count 50 pages, it prompts you on the print job you send then if that was 49 or fewer to complete the print job it will repeat the prompt on the next print job. So you print 5 pages, hit the "ok" it prints.... you send another 5 page print job, hit the "ok" and it prints.... etc forever.

My toner carts are showing 0% and still do a fine job. I get the feeling that this is nothing but annoying people as a money grab.

 

[voyagerfan99]

I'll bring the baseball bat and find an empty field... you bring the printer! Seriously 10 minutes?!

The jetdirect card is crapping out on it too. It goes to sleep and doesn't come back online, so you need to power-cycle the printer. I bought another jetdirect card but it didn't make any difference.

My boss refuses to get rid of it, but I plan on pitching a new Dell color laserjet to him next week.