HP MDF 3301sdw LaserJet Pro Color Printer Scanner Review

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You’ll receive the printer, user manuals, and 5 ft power cord. The printer measures 16.5” wide, 13” tall, and 14.75” from front to back. On top is an auto-document feeder that can accommodate up to 50 sheets from 4" x 6" to legal size (8.5" x 14"). When the scanner lid is opened, the total height is 21.5” tall. The glass scanner bed fit sheets up to A4 in size. At the front left-hand side of the machine is the tiltable touchscreen control panel which measures 3.75” x 2.25”. Just below it is a USB port and power button. The output tray can hold up to 100 pages. The machine comes with HP 218 starter cartridges and replacement toner will require microchips in order to be used; thankfully you can remove and re-use the chips from spent cartridges.

There is a single-sheet priority feed slot for specialty paper, and at the bottom is a 250-sheet capacity paper tray. The tray can be extended to accommodate legal size paper but will have a 2” gap at the front when closed. Handholds make lifting, carrying, and moving this 38 lb printer easier. You can connect to the printer wirelessly, via USB-B, or Ethernet, though cables are not provided. When connected to the internet, it can automatically download a firmware updates. To access administrative settings, you’ll need to enter the default PIN found on the sticker behind the front panel. You can manage the printer remotely via HP Smart Admin, an online, multi-printer, cloud-based dashboard.

Networked print jobs wake the printer immediately, and it takes about 15 seconds per side of the page for completed prints. Text is crisp and clear with even line spacing and easy to read. For color prints, fine details are sharp and distinct, the colors are vibrant and nicely saturated, though somewhat warmer/darker than expected. The maximum output speed is 26 pages per minute with a max resolution of 600x600 dpi.

Copies are quick with very good clarity and accuracy, slightly darker colors, and legible but very slightly stretched text. The alignment on copies is also slightly offset from the original. Single-sided pages can be combined into 2-sided documents using the ADF. There are no options for 2-sided originals as this printer cannot scan both sides of a page in a single pass. Scan speed is up to 20 pages per min for B&W and up to 9 for color.

When scanning the resolution can be set from 300 to 1200 dpi. By default the scan utility crops bounding white space; to change this, use the web interface or HP Scan utility to change from “Detect Content” to “Entire Scan Area.” For scans, saturation is reduced and the brightness and contrast are higher compared to the digital source image. There is some graininess and pixilation in the scan, however, most of the fine details are preserved. I scanned the same image at 1200 dpi and 300 dpi, and I was surprised to find that the 300 dpi image file was actually larger, since higher resolutions than 300 dpi are compressed to 200 dpi. The result is that the 300 dpi scan has better smoothness, less noise, and cleaner lines.

The machine is quite loud when operating (around 51 dBA), however, in sleep mode it is completely silent. Energy saving mode turns the printer off completely after a period of inactivity (1 to 8 hours), but you will have to press the power button to turn it on again. There is a setting called Quiet Mode that slows down printing to reduce noise while preserving print quality. With USB walk-up printing, just plug in a USB thumb drive with the files you want to print and select them on the LCD. However, I wasn’t able to get scan to USB to work. The HP Smart mobile app also works pretty well, and it’s easy to add the printer and print from your phone. But I wasn’t able to get the scan to phone feature to work either. Hopefully these issues will be corrected in a future firmware update.

Overall, the print quality from the 3301sdw is excellent. Text is clear and easy to read and colors are well-saturated and vibrant. WiFi connectivity and direct-connect options make the printer easy to use wirelessly, and I found the network connections to be stable and reliable. The main drawback for this model is that you cannot perform duplex or 2-sided scanning/copying in a single pass. You can only convert 1-sided pages into 2-sided prints using the ADF. Printing, scanning, and copying are quick, though there may be some small visible differences between the original and copy. While there are a few features I couldn’t get to work properly, these could potentially be fixed in future firmware or software updates. This printer won’t be ideal for those that need to scan or make lots of copies of 2-sided documents, but for everything else I think it works great.

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