The inexpensive HP LaserJet 1020 printer appears to have been designed by the company to be applicable to the needs of most home office users who have an occasional print job but nothing too out of the ordinary. It offers good quality text printing and its overall cost per page is good and low, due in part to its retail price. It is one of the 1000 series printers offered by Hewlett-Packard.

Specifically, this jet laser printer offers its services in monochrome and at a fairly decent printing speed of 14 pages per minute. This is par for the course for a unit at this price and in this particular market segment. Note that the 1020 appears to be primarily for use as a personal printer and not an office typewriter and there shouldn’t be much to worry about with print speed.

The 1020 can be easily connected to a PC via its attached USB connection port, which is the only available method of connecting the machine to a computer, in fact. It’s also not Mac compatible, so remember that if your goal is to find a cheap black and white laser printer for one of Apple’s computers. There are other HP printers in the line that are suitable for that particular role.

When it comes to the print quality that the 1020 is capable of producing, it is more than acceptable at 600 dpi resolution. It will also come out of the printer and sort quite quickly, with the first printed page coming out in about 10 seconds after the print job has been sent from the computer to the printer. HP includes one of its suites of image enhancement technology to keep your printed product looking good.

The only onboard memory available with the 1020 is 2MB of RAM, but that’s because the computer it’s connected to will be handling most of your printing processes. Hewlett-Packard includes a 234 MHz processor to ensure that all of these print jobs are handled quickly and efficiently and print job output is reduced to as good as 10 seconds.

As for the types of media the 1020 can print on, the variety is quite wide, including business cards, labels, plain paper, and envelopes along with transparencies. It stores about 150 sheets in its auto-loading input tray and has a durability of about 5,000 pages per month of maximum service. Actually, this is a pretty solid number for a small personal printer.

The 1020 uses a single black laser toner cartridge and can make good use of a variety of different Windows-based operating systems. This includes Windows ME, as well as Windows XP and XP Professional. Additionally, Hewlett-Packard supplies the 1020 with a one-year warranty that can be extended beyond that time for a small fee. It appears to be a durable little printer in the Hewlett-Packard line.