HP MFP3105 LaserJet B&W Monochrome Printer Review

HP MFP3105 LaserJet B&W Monochrome Printer Review

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Takeaway: Clear, sharp, detailed black and white prints/copies with hi-res color scanning.

You’ll receive the printer, user manuals, and 5 ft power cord. The printer measures 16” wide, 15.5” deep, and 12.5” tall. It weighs just over 21 lbs and is easy to lift and move using the handholds on the sides. When the scanner lid is open, the total height is about 20”.

The auto-document feeder (or ADF) on top, has a 50-sheet capacity and the left side pops open to clear paper jams. You can scan or copy a stack of originals at a rate of up to 19 ppm from 4x6 to legal size, but you can only capture one side of each page at a time. The return side pops up to make retrieval easier, and there is a flip out page stop as well. A work around could be to use the 1->2-sided option to combine individual pages to produce two-sided documents. While the highest resolution the ADF can achieve is 300 dpi, the flat bed scanner lets you scan individual pages up to size A4 at resolutions up to 1200 dpi.

Lifting up the scanner bed reveals the toner compartment. Inside, a drum and black toner cartridge are pre-installed. It is easy to remove and install by simply sliding it into the track. The standard 138A cartridge has a yield of 1500 pages, while the high yield version goes up to 4000 pages.

The output tray also has a flip-out stop to prevent your print outs from sliding out and off the machine. On the left-hand side is the pop-up LCD touchscreen control panel. It can be laid flat when not in use.

There is one paper tray at the bottom with a 250-sheet capacity with length and width page guides that also extends to accommodate legal size paper, though note that it will protrude from the front of the machine a couple inches when extended. You can also fully remove the tray by lifting it while pulling it out.

At the back, on the right is a USB-B port for a direct wired connection to a laptop or computer, Ethernet port for network connections and AC power port. At the bottom left is a Kensington lock slot, and the rear panel opens up so be sure to leave around 7” at the back to clear any paper jams.

The power button is at the front right-hand corner and the first time you power it on, it will go through an automatic calibration, which is a little noisy but only takes a minute to complete. Then you’ll need to setup the machine via the touchscreen controls. In addition the Ethernet and USB you can connect with the printer wirelessly, and it is compatible with both 2.4 and 5 GHz bandwidth networks. Once connected, you’ll set the date and time, then choose how you want to handle firmware updates, with auto update as an option. Then just load in some paper, ensuring both the length and width guides are touching the edges of the media. As there is no manual feed slot, you may be limited in terms the paper types and sizes you can use.

In the main menu on the control panel, you have Copy, Scan, and Quick Forms. The latter lets you print standard templates like graph paper, ruled paper, and blank music sheets which I thought was pretty neat. You can print up to 99 copies at a time. The print speed is fast at up to 33 pages per minute, however, the first few prints came out with a small black smudge near the top of each page. While it appeared to be getting lighter with each print, upon closer inspection of the toner cartridge, I found some toner powder clinging to the roller. After gently brushing it off subsequent prints came out perfect with no visible flaws.

When printing, the printer can execute 2-sided printing be retracting the page to print on the opposite side. Text is sharp, uniform, and clear with good legibility. When making photocopies from the scanner bed with the default settings, text remained very readable, though slightly underweight, as the light from the scanner tends to soften the edges of the lettering, resulting in a “skinnier” looking font. However, bumping up the quality to ‘Best’ and adjusting to print slightly darker resulted in a copy that was nearly was indistinguishable from the original.

When using the ADF with text documents, however, due to the mechanical action of the paper moving through the machine via rollers, text tends to stretch or compress at different points in the page. What you end up with is line spacing and lettering that isn't uniform, with some lines stretched taller while others appear compressed shorter, with an overall reduction in print area by a few pixels; so when compared side-by-side or overlaid, the copies don't line up perfectly. Most of the time, these flaws aren’t as noticeable on documents that don’t have a lot of text, but just keep this in mind if precision is important.

When copying color images, remember that the duplicate will be produced in black and white. However, I was surprised with how good images were reproduced in grayscale. Photographs print clean with deep, uniform blacks, lots of detail, little to no visible pixilation, and only occasionally had subtle areas of minor banding.
For scanning, you can also choose to scan to email, network folder, Sharepoint, or computer, though for the last one, additional software, HP Scan, needs to be installed on the PC. Once it was setup, I was able to initiate scans both from the computer and send scans to it from the printer’s control panel. The image capture is fairly accurate to the originals with color capture that only has a slight brightening effect. The flatbed scanner can capture resolutions up to 1200, which captures fine detail from the original document down to individual dots, though the scanning speed will be much slower.

There are other ways you can connect to the printer as well, including HP Cloud connection, or if you don’t want the printer connected to the Internet, Wi-Fi Direct and Bluetooth. HP Cloud lets you send print jobs to it remotely by simply emailing an attached document to the printer's unique email address, which lets anyone send jobs to your printer, sort of like a fax machine.
I was also able to print from and scan to my smartphone using the HP mobile app. You can manage the printer, monitor the amount of toner remaining, and order more supplies directly in the app as well.

The printer is a bit noisy while it’s operating and during warm up. However, there is a setting called ‘Quiet Mode’ that reduces the noise somewhat by operating the motors at lower speeds. But it won’t make the machine completely silent and print speed will be reduced.

Overall, if you don’t need to print in color, the HP LaserJet Pro MFP 3105sdw monochrome printer is a great option for business, home office, and school use, and its small enough for a home office or dorm room. As someone who infrequently scans documents and mostly prints text, the printer works great for my needs. The black and white image output was impressive, so there’s a use case there for that as well. Even with the text distortion using the ADF, it’s still convenient for scanning a stack of documents all at once. The only thing to remember is that you can’t scan or copy two-sided documents in a single pass.

As an Amazon Associate, I earn from qualifying purchases. #CommissionsEarned
Buy it at Amazon: HP MFP3105 LaserJet B&W Monochrome Printer [Affiliate Link]