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The HP LaserJet 1320 has an eye-catching two-tone design. It's amazingly compact, considering that it has a built-in duplexer. This two-sided printing capability can be a boon when it comes to long documents, but the feature contributes to the 1320's hefty $400 price tag.
The unit comes with a 250-sheet paper input tray for holding everyday paper. Envelopes and other odd-size media are relegated to the manual-feed slot, which accommodates only one item at a time. The bin atop the printer has room for 125 sheets to arrive face-down. The rear output door pulls down to provide a straight-through path for thicker media such as envelopes.
The 1320 achieved a respectable 8.8 pages per minute on our text printing tests, but it slowed to a lackadaisical 2.8 ppm on our graphics tests. Text looked crisp, and our line-art sample had sharp lines and only a little vertical banding, though we saw some fading in blocks of closely spaced lines. Though the photo print came out too light and had lots of horizontal banding, it retained good detail and had none of the distracting moire patterns we see so often from laser printers.
We connected the 1320 to our test system via its USB 2.0 port (it also has a parallel port). Other versions of this printer, including the $500 1320n, have built-in networking--but this model lacks a network interface, and you can't add a network card to it.
Upshot: The HP LaserJet 1320 has some desirable features and produces good-looking text, but the high price and poor graphics quality are serious limitations.
Rated 22 ppm, Standard 16MB of RAM, 1200-by-1200-dpi maximum resolution, 250 sheets input, 125 output; USB 2.0 ports. One-year warranty, 12-hour weekday toll-free phone support.
$399
800/752-0900
www.hp.com
Paul Jasper
