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Although the Pro 452dw ($499.99) is a lower-end model in HP’s PageWide Pro line of printers, it still offers the sizzling speed of the company’s PageWide inkjet printer technology. Thanks to a print-head assembly that runs the full width of the page and remains stationary while the paper moves across it, it produced speeds in our testing more typical of laser printers than inkjets. It is built for a similar print volume to the Editors’ Choice HP Color LaserJet Pro M452dw ($899.90 at Amazon)(Opens in a new window) , but with greater paper capacity and much lower running costs, and it takes that laser-based model’s place as our Editors’ Choice medium-duty color printer for a micro or small office.
Design and Features
The two-tone (off-white and matte black) 452dw ($615.31 at Amazon)(Opens in a new window) measures 14.5 by 20.9 by 16.0 inches (HWD), and is best kept on a table or bench of its own. It weighs 36.1 pounds, so although one person could probably handle it, you may want two people to move it into place. Standard paper capacity is 550 sheets of up to legal-size paper, split between a 500-sheet main tray and a 50-sheet multipurpose feeder. A second 500-sheet paper tray (available for $199) can also be added. It includes an auto-duplexer for two-sided printing. It has substantially more paper capacity than the HP M452dw, which has a 250-sheet main tray plus 50-sheet multipurpose feeder.
The 452dw has a maximum monthly duty cycle of 50,000 pages and a recommended monthly duty cycle of up to 4,500 sheets. This is lighter-duty than the HP PageWide Pro 552dw ($1,199.00 at Amazon)(Opens in a new window) (80,000 sheets maximum, 6,000 sheets recommended), and the same as the HP M452dw.
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The 577dw has a good selection of both wired and wireless printing choices. It includes USB for connecting to a computer and Ethernet for connecting to a wired LAN. (I tested it over an Ethernet connection, with its drivers installed on our standard testbed running Windows 10 Professional.) It has built-in Wi-Fi, and supports HP wireless direct—the company’s proprietary equivalent of Wi-Fi Direct. It is Apple AirPrint compatible, and supports printing from Google Cloud Print. It offers a good set of drivers, including PCL6, PCL5, and HP’s PostScript emulation. Most businesses don’t need to print with PostScript, but for those that do, a PostScript driver is a must.
Print Speed
As we expected for a PageWide printer, speed is one of the 452dw’s strengths. I timed it at 31.4 pages per minute (ppm) in printing the text-only (Word) portion of our new business applications suite. That’s short of its 40ppm rated speed in its default Presentation mode, but still a dazzling speed for an inkjet. On our full business suite, which includes PDF, PowerPoint, and Excel files in addition to the aforementioned Word document, it averaged 16.4ppm, the highest speed we’ve clocked for an inkjet in this test. Although we can’t measure it head-to-head with the HP 552dw, which we tested with our old suite, it’s probably slower than that printer, which has a rated printing speed of 50ppm at default settings. We also can’t compare it directly with the laser-based HP M452dw, which has a rated speed of 28ppm.
Output Quality and Running Costs
Output quality was mixed in testing, with above-average text, and slightly below-par graphics and photos. Text should be good enough for any business use except those requiring tiny fonts, which isn’t always the case with inkjets.
See How We Test Printers
With graphics, I noticed some banding, a regular pattern of faint striations, in about half of the backgrounds, and in some cases it was a little distracting. Still, graphics should be good enough for printing PowerPoint handouts to be distributed to a casual audience. Some, but not all, of the photos were up to the quality we’d expect from drugstore prints. There was some loss of detail in bright areas.
The 452dw has running costs of 1.4 cents per monochrome page and 7.3 cents per color page based on HP’s figures. These costs are slightly higher than those of the HP 572dw (1.3 cents per black and 6.8 cents per color page), but substantially lower than those of the HP M452dw (2.2 cents per black and 13.2 cents per color page).
Conclusion
No longer do laser printers rule the roost in speed, text quality, and running costs. Laser-class inkjets such as the HP PageWide Pro 452dw Printer give them a run for their money. It has greater paper capacity and much lower running costs than the HP Color LaserJet Pro M452dw, with slightly better text quality (though not as good graphics) in our testing. The 452dw replaces that model as our medium-duty color laser printer of choice for a small or micro office.
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The HP PageWide Pro 452dw Printer is a speedy inkjet with good text quality and paper capacity, and competitive running costs.
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