HP LaserJet Pro M402dw Pro Reviews

As we were finishing up this review, the LaserJet Pro M402dw went on sale direct from HP for $299.99, or $50 off its list price. As usual, though, it’s not the initial cost of this printer that gives us pause. As we said earlier, if you use it for half, or a third, of its 80,000-page duty cycle, at 2.2 cents a page, it’s too expensive to use considering what other models could deliver. If you’re printing a thousand (or thousands) of pages a day, you really do need as low a CPP as you can get.Let’s take, for example, the difference between 2.2 cents and 1.5 cents, which works out to seven-tenths of a cent. Assume you’re printing 40,000 pages each month. At 2.2 cents, 40,000 pages costs $880, while printing those same 40,000 pages at 1.5 cents each costs $600. That’s a $280 difference, or almost enough to buy this printer again, every month. And that adds up to a whopping $3,360 per year. That might be a drop in the budget bucket for a corporation, but a stark bottom-line difference for a home office or a small business. Granted, we did find the high-yield version of the cartridge sold in places for low enough prices to get the CPP just under 2 cents—but nowhere near the ideal target of 1.5 cents or less. As we’ve said about many printers in which the CPP is just too high to recommend it as a high-volume solution, that doesn’t mean that this isn’t a good printer. It is—as long as you’re printing a few hundred pages or so each week, tops.

The HP LaserJet Pro M402dw monochrome laser printer delivers a balance of speed, paper handling, and running cost that's suitable for a workgroup or small office.