All you need for light-duty monochrome printing
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.
