This monochromatic laser is suitable for personal printing or micro office
The low purchase price of Pantum P3012DW is balanced with a slightly higher cost per page, but this monochrome laser excels in text quality, connection options, and paper handling.
The price of the Pantum P3012DW is low enough-Amazon and other retailers sell it at $139.99 or less, although the company says it has no price tag-it can be defined as a basic entry-level monochrome laser printer, but it offers more than You might expect much more. Compared with HP Neverstop Laser 1001nw and Lexmark MS431dw, it offers more connection options, both of which are winners of the Editor's Choice Award, and the price is more expensive. Pantum also offers automatic two-sided printing and higher paper capacity that HP does not have. Its cost per page is a bit higher than typical and much higher than Neverstop's, but whether this will be a problem depends on how many pages you want to print. For small offices with low volume, P3012DW may just be a ticket.
Pantum, an emerging Chinese company, is not a particularly well-known brand, but its printers have been around since 2010. We commented on and liked Pantum laser printers as early as 2013, and the company has a firm foothold in the monochrome laser market in the budget. This is another strength of its stable personal laser printer.
Setting up such printers is often simple because they are small and have only one toner cartridge to deal with. This mainly applies to the P3012DW, although the printer drum is separate from the toner, rather than contained in the same cartridge. To set up the device, remove the tray containing the toner cartridge and toner cartridge, pull the protective sheet from the toner cartridge, remove the toner cartridge from the tray, pull out the plastic pull tab that holds the toner in place during transportation, and then Press the buckle to put the ink cartridge back in the tray and replace the tray in the printer.
You can easily place the P3012DW wherever you like; it measures 9.1 x 13.9 x 13.1 inches (HWD), weighs 15 pounds, and is small enough to share your desk. However, you can place it elsewhere in the office and easily connect via Ethernet, Wi-Fi or Wi-Fi Direct. There is also a USB port and NFC support for mobile devices. The control panel near the upper right corner consists of a two-line LCD, two status indicators, and several buttons for moving in the menu.
A single tray of the printer can hold up to 250 sheets of letter or legal size paper, suitable for most home offices and workgroups of 1 to 3 people. The single-sheet multipurpose tray allows you to feed letterhead or other special-purpose media without changing the paper in the paper tray.
Pantum recommends a monthly duty cycle of 750 to 3,500 pages, but if you regularly print more than 1,000 pages per month (about 50 pages per working day), refilling the tray quickly becomes an unwelcome chore . Please also note that with the high-capacity ink cartridge installed, the estimated cost per page of the printer is 2.8 cents, while the Lexmark MS431dw is 1.8 cents. If you want to print only 20,000 pages during the life of the printer, saving a penny per page will be enough to pay for Lexmark's higher purchase price.
In this review, I connected P3012DW via Ethernet. The driver installation is simple and old-fashioned, which means that Pantum provides the driver and installation program on the CD (although the quick installation guide also provides instructions for downloading the software from the company's website). The one-button setup program just asks you to choose between USB, Wi-Fi, or Ethernet connection.
You can also print from a mobile device, connect via Wi-Fi, or connect via Wi-Fi Direct without a shared network. Unfortunately, I found that mobile printing settings are more problematic than PC equivalents. The separate mobile printing user guide tells you how to download the required application, and then instructs you to print the Wi-Fi wizard page and use the application to scan the QR code on it. But it doesn't tell you how to print the page (the answer can be found in the online video, which is to press the Wi-Fi button on the front panel).
Even without instructions, I managed to establish a Wi-Fi Direct connection, proving that the mobile printing function works, and it will be useful once you know that you press the Wi-Fi button to set it up. As mentioned earlier, the printer also supports NFC for devices running Android 4.4 and higher, but Pantum stated that it does not work on all Android 11 devices. When I try to use it with my Samsung Galaxy S20 FE 5G, when I touch the latter to the NFC tag, it can automatically launch the mobile application on the phone, but it cannot establish the connection required for printing.
In our tests, the P3012DW is rated at 32 pages per minute (ppm), which is only a bit slower than its more expensive competitors. When printing our 12-page Microsoft Word document, its average speed is 24.8ppm, which is 2 to 5ppm slower than HP LaserJet Pro M404dn, Lexmark MS431dw or Lexmark B3442dw (it is almost insignificantly 2 to 5 seconds longer for 12 pages).
When printing our full set of business documents, Pantum's speed is 17.9ppm, which is 2.6 to 5.1ppm slower than most competitors, but a bit faster than HP Neverstop 1001nw. It takes an average of 9 seconds to print a 4 x 6 inch photo.
The output quality varies from admirable text to ordinary graphics and photos. For fonts that may be used for commercial documents, the text provides clear, clean edges and is easy to read even at 4 o'clock, and one of the two highly stylized bold stroke fonts we tested is easy to read at 8 o'clock. The other font is more difficult to render. It closes the spaces between and inside the characters, making any text smaller than 12 points difficult to read.
As for photos and graphics, I think the quality of P3012DW is enough to clearly convey the image, but not enough to provide important customers or customers. Thin lines are missing or broken, graphics and photos show banding, uneven pile height in dark fills, and easy-to-see dithering patterns.
Pantum P3012DW is affordable and cheaper than most other personal lasers. It is a bit slower than most, but unless you print a lengthy document, you are unlikely to notice. Compared to most printers mentioned here, it is severely limited by relatively low paper capacity (no optional trays or drawers for expansion) and higher cost per page.
If your print volume is moderate, check out HP LaserJet Pro M404dn, Lexmark B3442dw or B3340dw, or Lexmark MS431dw, which won the Editor’s Choice Award. The choice between them depends largely on how much you expect to print and how this will affect the total cost of ownership. If you can use manual rather than automatic duplex printing and a single 150-sheet input tray, be sure to consider another Editor’s Choice winner, HP Neverstop Laser 1001nw. In our test, it is the slowest in this group, but its cost per page is as low as 0.3 cents, which may save you hundreds of dollars over its entire life cycle. However, if you need a little more capacity than Neverstop and will not print enough pages to worry about running costs, Pantum may be the right choice.
The low purchase price of Pantum P3012DW is balanced with a slightly higher cost per page, but this monochrome laser excels in text quality, connection options, and paper handling.
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M. David Stone is a freelance writer and computer industry consultant. He is a recognized generalist and has written credits on various topics such as ape language experiments, politics, quantum physics, and an overview of top companies in the gaming industry. David has extensive expertise in imaging technology (including printers, monitors, large-screen displays, projectors, scanners, and digital cameras), storage (magnetic and optical), and word processing.
David's 40 years of technical writing experience includes a long-term focus on PC hardware and software. Writing credits include nine computer-related books, major contributions to the other four, and more than 4,000 articles published in national and global computer and general interest publications. His books include Color Printer Underground Guide (Addison-Wesley) Troubleshooting Your PC, (Microsoft Press), and Faster and Smarter Digital Photography (Microsoft Press). His work has appeared in many print and online magazines and newspapers, including Wired, Computer Shopper, ProjectorCentral, and Science Digest, where he served as a computer editor. He also wrote a column for Newark Star Ledger. His non-computer related work includes the NASA Upper Atmosphere Research Satellite Project Data Manual (written for GE's Astro-Space Division) and occasional science fiction short stories (including simulation publications).
Most of David's writing in 2016 was written for PC Magazine and PCMag.com, as a contributing editor and lead analyst for printers, scanners and projectors. He returned as a contributing editor in 2019.
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