HP Color LaserJet Pro M255dw Printer Review
9/10 (Expert Score)- Impress with color and increase efficiency: This business printer offers extraordinary wireless printing, fast print speeds––up to 22 ppm, automatic two-sided printing, and an intuitive 2.7" color touchscreen

$549.99
Description
HP Color LaserJet Pro M255dw Design
The M255dws design is rather mundane except for the slightly out-of-place-looking control panel propped up on one corner. It does fold down so any concerns about bumping into it and knocking it off should be eased. The reason the somewhat bloated-looking case is so big is to house 4 huge color toner cartridges. Sliding them in and out for replacement might make you wonder how they got them all to fit in there, to begin with.
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Underneath all the color printer complexity of toners, drums, and duplexers is a smallish tray that holds up to 150 pages of letter-sized paper. Right above that is a tiny manual feed multi-purpose tray for envelopes, labels, and card stock. Slap it all together and it works. Rather nicely in fact to the tune of up to 22ppm which is plenty fast for a color printer. The cherry on top of this printer’s design is the color touchscreen control panel which is surprisingly easy to use and intuitive. All the functions you need to operate this printer can be found there including wired and WiFi network setup.
Features
The HP Color LaserJet Pro M255dw supports wireless printing at speeds up to 22ppm, automatic two-sided printing (auto-duplexing) and it all can be managed with the colorful 2.7-inch color touch screen or mobile app. The HP Smart app allows you to set the printer up using a mobile device, manage print jobs, and even provide notifications. It can be connected to your network with WiFi, Ethernet, or directly to a laptop or PC with a USB cable. The single paper tray supports a wide range of paper sizes including letter, legal, executive, 4×6 in A4, A5, A6, B5, B6, postcards, and envelopes. HP recommends you only use original HP toner cartridges (Black, Cyan, Magenta, and Yellow) to take full advantage of HPs “JetIntelligence” which maintains consistent print quality. HP has also added a nice convenience feature that allows printing from a USB drive (See below.)
HP Color LaserJet Pro M255dw Performance
The first thing most people want to do when they get a color laser printer is to test it out by printing out a photo. You may find yourself a little underwhelmed if you attempt that with this printer. Its color resolution is only 600×600 which is not nearly enough to reproduce a high-resolution photo. Keep in mind this is an entry-level printer designed to print internal documents and letters in a small office/home office not outbound marketing materials for a design studio. When it comes to standard text, charts, and graphs the M255dw shines. It produces great results: crisp black text and vibrant color graphics. The printer is noisier than most black and white laserjets but that’s to be expected because a color laserjet has many more moving parts. If you get this model don’t worry if you hear occasional clunking noises. Nothing is broken. Those noises are common with this model. In terms of user-friendliness, the M255dw scores high. The network setup is easy and can be done quickly from the touch screen without being a network whiz. Installing, and removing the toner requires very little guesswork as long as you know how to handle toner.
Setup
When first connecting this printer to your network or directly to a computer with USB Windows 10 should respond with a pop-up asking you to download and install an app called HP Smart from the Microsoft Store. Go ahead and do it. Once installed the app provides a nice, browser-like view of all the internal settings of your printer. The wonders of Plug and Play should allow Windows 10 to install your printer drivers automatically. Once you use the control panel to enter your WiFi network’s SSID and passphrase you should be able to use the same drivers installed for the Ethernet connection to connect wirelessly. I recommend giving the printer a static IP address. I discuss setting static and DHCP IP addresses in my Free eBook.
HP Color LaserJet Pro M255dw – Video
Youtube
Conclusion
Once you get over the hump of expecting your new color printer to print out photo-quality duplicates of everything in your photo album and finally get down to what this printer is designed for you should be quite happy with it. This printer is designed for light-duty use in a small/home office printing 250 – 2,000 pages per month of sharp, high-quality text with charts and graphs. It does it with as little muss or fuss as you can expect from a color laserjet printer. Believe me, the more sophisticated models can be a huge pain if you’re not careful. The HP Color LaserJet Pro M255dw – that’s its name, don’t wear it out.
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Last update on 2025-02-11 at 04:44 Affiliate links and Images from Amazon Product Advertising API
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