After printing my first document I was very concerned. The colors were out of alignment. I did all the troubleshooting steps and used the calibration mode multiple times but nothing helped. After a 1/2 hour searching the web I came across a suggestion to upgrade the firmware. After another 20 minutes to find and install it, I still had the same issue, But, then I remembered the calibration mode. Previously, pressing the button did nothing but now, with new firmware, pressing the calibration button triggered a process where you could hear the printer doing some kind of mechanical alignment. A few moments later and another test print and voilà! It worked. Now it prints flawlessly. Colors aligned perfectly and the wireless works great. I have a Windows 7 PC, MacBook Air and IOS devices and they all work great with it.
If you're looking for a fast, small color laser with usable color-photo ability and two-sided printing... Stop looking, and just click buy. First, what the pro's and con's of this printer:
-Pro: Size. for the longest time, Samsung had the market cornered for small color lasers while HP was putting out behemoths. the 252/254 definitely changed that tide. its small... its light... and its well behaved (easy access to front and back)
Pro: Performance. Everyone and their uncle can do black-and-white laser... Making a good color laser printer which can actually print usable color photos is another league. This printer won't put inkjet photo out of business, but if you have to have one printer in your house that has a big duty cycle, decent cost per page, and no-fade printouts, this is it.
Pro: Initial cost. Its not that bad. $230 gets you the printer, and about 1600 pages printed out of the box... or $0.14/per page. Even if you throw this thing in the trash after you exhaust the cartridges, that's not bad given the quality.
Pro: Duplex. Its a bit wonky since due to the small printer size, there is no elegant way to pass the paper through the print path twice, but its effective... The printer printer prints page one, pulls the sheet back in by itself, and prints on the back side, then it ejects the completed page. Its more than adequate.
Con: Plastic... lots of it. Like the 252, the 254 has a LOT of plastic inside vs metal... It makes the printer light, but the gears are fragile. of the 5 252's I've bought, one died of a transmission failure after 18 months... some of the gearing inside just cracked.
Con: Refill consumables. This is where things get weird. The printer out of the box will get you about 1600 pages, at $0.14/page... If you buy a set of regular-yield (201"A") replacement cartridges for about $320 (ignoring the cost of the printer), the subsequent pages are closer to $0.18/page. If you buy high-yield cartridges (i.e., 201"X") for about $400 (ignoring the cost of the printer), the price is closer to the original $0.14/page. So IMO its environmentally bad behavior HP is trying to instill by making the cost of replacement cartridges the same as throwing the printer out and buying another one with full cartridges. You have an option to buy refill cartridges and that'll drop your cost to $0.03/page, but I promise you the color quality will be barely usable from first hand experience.
Last: M254 vs M252
The 254 is about 10% faster on prints, uses about 5% more power, and the LCD is about 1/4" smaller than the 252 that it replaces.
I've had HP laserjet printers for 2 decades. Most have performed fairly well and have been very sturdy workhorses. I just got this 254dw yesterday and it's my first experience with a color laserjet in my home office; hard to pass up at this price point. The build looks really cheap (plastic is very thin and feels very fragile compared to my older non-color laserjets.) It came with a CD but no printed manual... just a small collection of paper scraps written in 75 languages about how to plug it in and turn it on. I can't complain about the print quality; it's quite good. What was surprising to me is what looks like a manual feed paper tray is just a slot where you can cross your fingers and shove a bunch of paper into. I nearly broke that tray trying to pull it out to load it up (it isn't supposed to pull out, I guess... the tiniest of printed manuals would have told me that.) I purchased this with a high-capacity black toner because I know how fast we use up toner here. I may end up splurging for a more expensive printer when this one finally runs out of the colored toner as it looks like the cartridges are about $100 each and you have each of CMYK to replace for a cost nearing $400 for a printer that feels like it's doing it best to not break.
I'll be the first to admit that printers aren't perfect. Knowing that as a fundamental truth, this one is the BEST printer I've ever owned. My whole life I was wasting time with ink jet printers (mostly because they were too expensive) but let's face it: ink jet printers are so annoying. Always running out of ink, poor print quality--Yuck. When my last ink jet print broke, I set about finding a high quality, affordable, color laser-jet printer for home use.
My highest priority was compatibility and easy-of-use with Apple devices. To start my search, I went to the Apple Store. Not to buy anything (I'm not sure they even sell printers)-- I went to see what printers the staff were using to print stuff for customers and there were using an HP printer that was basically the black & white version of this [M254dw] printer here that you're now reading about. If this line of printers is good enough for Apple to outfit their stores with them, that's good enough for me! That gave me confidence and I made the purchase here on Amazon.
Got it home and it was SUPER SIMPLE to setup. Took maybe 10 minutes. Plugged it, connected it to my WiFi and I was printing in a matter of minutes. Oddly enough, printing from my iPhone/iPad was EASIER that from the computer. There was LITERALLY no setup at all. No drivers, no software... nothing. Just immediate connectivity and functionality.
My iMac on the other hand, took one round of troubleshooting to get printing from, which involved me having to go to the HP website and download updated drivers, which HP didn't make particularly easy to find. Plus, the only reason I did this is just my own knowledge of computers, etc.. A novice would never know to do that. They'd get this printer home, it wouldn't work and they'd think it was a bad printer. HP could do a better job of BROADCASTING the steps that need to be taken to get the printer working, or better yet figure out a way to have it happen automatically so the user doesn't need to bother with it at all. This was the imperfect part of the process.
Other than that, it's been an awesome printer... great image quality, fast, and checks the box of my highest priority of Apple compatibility. If you're an Apple user I highly recommend this printer!
Integrates well with my household network of mixed devices consisting of ipads, mac mini, android phone, iphone, windows 10 laptop & desktops. Finally purchased a new printer after my Deskjet 990cxi (yes very very old) became too challenging to get the driver for on my windows 10 machines. The 990cxi is built like a tank, just keep feeding it ink cartridges and it will continue to print, its only the driver became very difficult to install starting with Windows 7 then 10 so decided to retire it. The current M254dw works exceptionally well, wifi works seamlessly for the last year via the tablets, phones, laptops, it prints via the email printing service from wherever I may be to pick it up at home and ethernet configuration is just simple to configure and if you want to get really controlling with the network settings the jetdirect software allows you to do that. The print quality, speed, paper capacity and handling are excellent. The printer has run through about ~1100 sheets (some card stock heavier paper through manual feed and regular printer paper in tray) the past year I've owned this and have not had any issues with any of these devices that are in the household.
If i had to point out a downside its the number of toner cartridges it uses, four (Blk, C/M/Y) but you know and accept that going into color laser. So far this has been working flawlessly, the output and connectivity are stellar.
Feature Product
- BIG PERFORMANCE IN A SMALL PACKAGE - This compact color laser printer features fastest in-class double-sided printing and first page out, plus mobile and wireless printing, USB port, and a 2.7-inch color touchscreen
- FAST PRINT SPEEDS - Prints up to 22 pages per minute black/color, first page out as fast as 10.2 sec black and 11.8 sec color, input tray paper capacity up to 250 sheets
- EASILY PRINT FROM YOUR MOBILE DEVICE - Simply connect your iOS or Android device to the same network as your printer to print, or print without a network using Wi-Fi Direct
- THE POWER OF YOUR PRINTER IN THE PALM OF YOUR HAND - The HP Smart app allows you to easily set up your printer, scan from your smartphone, order toner, and print from the cloud-such as iCloud, Dropbox and Google Drive
- WIRELESS CONNECTIVITY YOU CAN COUNT ON - Have confidence in your connection with steady performance from dual band Wi-Fi, plus Ethernet capability for wired networking
- MORE PAGES, PERFORMANCE, AND PROTECTION - Count on high-quality color and more pages than before with Original HP Toner cartridges with JetIntelligence
- NEVER SHOP FOR TONER AGAIN: Save 10% with Amazon Dash Replenishment. Upon activation your printer measures toner level and places smart reorders when you are running low. No subscription fees.
- ONE-YEAR LIMITED HARDWARE WARRANTY - 24-hour, 7 days a week FREE HP Web support
Description
Designed for work teams of 1–10 individuals who want the latest solutions to improve business efficiency, the HP Color LaserJet Pro M254dw allows you to print high-quality color documents quickly and conveniently. With the fastest in-class two-sided printing speed and first page out, plus an intuitive touchscreen, easy mobile printing, and a reliable wireless connection, this printer has your office printing needs covered. Pair it with the HP Smart app and you have the power to scan documents on the go with your smartphone camera, and print from the cloud using iCloud, Dropbox or Google Drive.
It's an HP LaserJet; I expect it to work well, and it does. I have it wired into my home network, so I can't say how well the wireless works. It took just a bit of tweaking to get it to talk to my network, but no serious problems setting it up. It performs well, does just what I need, and has a couple of extra little goodies that I don't need, but would be useful if I was still working (I'm retired). Since I don't need Web Services, I didn't enable it. It is not a powerhouse, but I don't need a powerhouse. This machine is more than strong enough for me and my wife.
It does what i need with a minimum of fuss and bother. I've used HP printers for years both at home at work, and this one doesn't change my opinion; it's a solid machine that works well.
I bought this to replace a slightly older HP Color Laserjet which did not support Google Cloud Print. My daughter uses a Chromebook for school so that was a necessity.
Granted, I am "networking guy," but I scratch my head when I see all the negative comments citing issues with network connectivity on this printer. I have a very basic home network; an internet router and dual band wireless on the same SSID. I am however using higher end wireless access points than the one built into my (ISP provided) router.
It connected to my WiFi the first time and since that time (2 months ago) it has never failed. I was planning to add an ethernet drop to the room where the printer sits, but it hasn't been necessary.
I'm using Windows 10 on my work PC and it works great with this printer. I did NOT install the HP software - just added the printer through the Settings pane. Super easy and zero issues.
Also, the prints come out fine especially given the price. Duplex works flawlessly. No complaints.
We run a business out of our house, and after years of suffering with uninspired printers of questionable quality I was blown away by this very affordable color laser printer from HP. The print quality is great, for both B&W and color. It was quite easy to add the printer to my home network over wi-fi, and it connects seamlessly to my PC and Apple computers. An added bonus is the email auto-print and the ability to easily print from our iphones. I signed up for the dash replenishment service, and like not having to worry about ink.
clear text, photo is not bad either, for a laser printer. quick warm up (for a color laser printer). compact. color makes it blend into the white-walled home office so it's unobtrusive too. Love it. Great value. starter toners can print up to about 700 pages, and since we don't print color that much (we have a separate monochrome for daily high-volume printing) that will last us a while before having to buy the standard ones
Fast easy setup. Wireless network setup, HP eprint & google cloud print setup in about 5 minutes. I haven't printed any photos yet but what I have printed looks great. Two sided printing. At this point I haven't used Windows or Mac just my Chromebook and Pixel XL to print with. No regrets.
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