HP LaserJet M209d

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If you need light-duty printing—and don't need it done in color—HP's LaserJet M209d ($119) may be the printer you want. If you're already sold on laser models because of their crisper text and line graphics on plain paper compared with inkjets, the M209d stands out for delivering better output quality in our tests than most mono lasers in its price range. And if you're still considering an inkjet, but print only occasionally, it's a tempting alternative. It won't waste money on color ink that's used only for printer housekeeping tasks, and it doesn't have nozzles to clog even if you leave it sitting unused for months. It lacks Wi-Fi and Ethernet connectivity, so it's best suited to single-user duty, but its price, output quality, and solid performance are enough to earn it our Editors' Choice award for a budget laser for light duty.

Design: Easy to Get Started With, If You Know How

Physical setup for the M209d is notably easy. The toner cartridge ships inside the printer ready to use, so no prep work is needed. Even better, the printer weighs 12.4 pounds and measures 10.4 by 14 by 16.8 inches (HWD), making it light enough for one person to unpack and put in place, and small enough to comfortably share a desk with. Its only connection choice is USB, but it even comes with a cable in case you don't already have a spare one in this era of Wi-Fi.

The Setup Guide gives five steps, but if you stop after the first three, you should have a working printer: remove the packing materials; connect the cables and turn the printer on; and load paper. In my tests, using our standard testbed PC, Windows 10 automatically installed the right driver. And although macOS drivers are not available, the printer supports Airprint, so you can print via a USB connection without a driver.

However, the final two steps in the setup guide—downloading and installing the HP Smart app—did not go smoothly in my tests. The download worked well enough, but the app could not find the printer. According to HP, the printer should simply show up in the app if the driver's installed, and eventually it did, but not until I turned on the PC the next day and opened the app. HP was not able to replicate that lag, so couldn't suggest a fix, but the good news is that you don't need the app at all. The only functionality it adds is HP's Mobile Faxing, a feature that supports outgoing faxes only and has nothing to do with the printer itself. (You only need an HP account to send outgoing faxes via the app.)

If you're familiar with HP Smart from using it with other HP printers, you probably know that it also offers support for mobile and remote printing. However, for USB-connected models like the M209d, it does not support either feature. The setup guide supplied with the review unit indicates that you can download HP Smart from Google Play and the Apple App Store, which will also let you take advantage of the Mobile Faxing feature from your phone. The capability is particularly worth mentioning here because HP says the reference to the phone apps may be removed from future printings of the guide to avoid the implication that they can be used for remote or mobile printing with the M209d. It's already been removed from the online version.

Despite the potential for frustration during setup, it's hard to count this as a major strike against the printer. It prints perfectly well with or without HP Smart installed, and if HP Smart didn't exist, I wouldn't have considered it an oversight.

Paper handling is easily a match for light-to-moderate-duty use for anything up to a micro office. The 150-sheet tray can handle up to legal-size paper, and the printer supports automatic duplexing (two-sided printing). The tray is also at the bottom front of the printer, which makes it easy to refill, insert a few sheets of a different size or type as needed, or swap out the entire stack.

HP gives the recommended monthly maximum as 200 to 2,000 pages, but 2,000 pages would translate to 100 sheets per day (assuming 20 work days per month) or a little more than 50 sheets if you print mostly in duplex, which could leave you needing to refill the tray more often than you might want to. If you prefer keeping refills down to once a week on average, 600 sheets per month would be the right ceiling.

A more significant issue related to how many pages you print per month is the running cost of 3.7 cents per page. That's a bit higher than for most printers that cost more, which means the more you print, the more likely you'll save money in the long run by choosing a more expensive printer with a lower per-page cost. That said, note that the drum is part of the M209d's toner cartridge, while printers that offer lower per-page costs for toner may have separate imaging units. When comparing with those printers, you'll need to add in the cost for the imaging units also. As always, the number to focus on is the total cost of ownership, as we discuss in our guide to How to Save Money on Your Next Printer.

Testing the LaserJet M209d: Speedy, With Top-Tier Text Quality

For judging the M209d's performance, I chose two single-function printers to compare it with—the Brother HL-L2460DW and the more expensive Ricoh 132 P—plus one multifunction model, the HP LaserJet MFP M234sdw, which offers essentially the same print features as the M209d but adds scanning and copying.

For simplex printing of our 12-page Word file, the Brother printer was significantly faster than the others for pages two through 12, the 132 P came in second, and the two HP models tied for third. However, the M209d had the fastest first-page-out (FPO) time, so for the full 12 pages, the M209d and HL-L2460DW were virtually tied for first place, while the other two tied for a close third.

This translates to the M209d being a bit faster than the others for one- and two-page text files, no real-world advantage for any of them at 10 or 12 pages, and an advantage for the Brother printer for significantly longer files. However, if you rarely print text files longer than 15 pages or so, none of them will be noticeably faster than the others.

On our full business-applications suite, which adds PDF, Excel, and PowerPoint files, the situation is similar for the Brother printer and the two HP models, and the same goes for printing the Word file in duplex. However, the Ricoh printer was the slowest on each of those additional tests, and it was slower by enough to notice.

For 4-by-6-inch photos, the M209d averaged 12 seconds per photo.

Text quality in our tests was top tier for a mono laser in the M209d's price range, and close to top tier for mono lasers in general. Except for an italic font, which was easily readable at 5 points, every font we tested that would likely be used in business documents was easily readable at 4 points, and it took a careful look using a loupe to spot a few minor flaws in form in some of the fonts at that size. Of the two highly stylized fonts with heavy strokes in our tests, one was easily readable at 8 points, while the other was easily readable at 10 points.

Graphics quality is a small step down compared with text overall, with some of the graphics we printed qualifying as top tier, and others showing flaws, but—with one exception—still good enough for most purposes. The exception was in a line graphic with a black background, where one of the lines was rendered in nearly as dark a black as the background itself, making it almost impossible to see. However, thin lines generally held well, including against a black background, and most line graphics and fills looked fine. Graphics with gradients tended to be darker than they should be and in some cases showed slight posterization (shading changing suddenly where it should change gradually), but they didn't lose any information.

Photos were also a touch darker than they should be, and some showed minor dithering that made them look grainy. However, they held on to most shadow detail and were better overall than what you'd expect from a black-and-white newspaper photo.

Verdict: A Top Choice for Light-Duty Printing

The M209d can't connect to Wi-Fi. If you need this capability, consider any of the other printers mentioned in this review. (All three offer Ethernet and Wi-Fi, though Wi-Fi is an extra-cost option for the Ricoh 132 P.) Among these three, the HP M234sdw is the only one that doesn't offer a higher paper capacity than the M209d, but it's also the only multifunction printer in this group, adding scanning and copying capabilities. Both the 132 P and the Brother HL-L2460DW offer 250-sheet main trays. In addition, the HL-L2460DW offers a single-sheet bypass for a second paper feed, while the 132 P has a 50-sheet second tray and will let you add a third tray as well.

That said, if you don't need any of these extra features, you don't need to pay extra for them. Plus, a scanner or additional paper capacity adds size and weight, leaving you with a printer less convenient to share a desk with. That leaves the LaserJet M209d as cheaper, smaller, and a standout out in its price class for its top-tier text output. The combination makes it our Editors' Choice pick for an inexpensive mono laser for light-duty printing, whether at home, as a personal printer in any size office, or as a stellar alternative to an inkjet for those who don't need color printing.