HP LaserJet Pro M118dw Printer Review
8.5/10 (Expert Score)
- Uncompromising quality – Produce consistently high-quality prints with the HP LaserJet Pro M118dw wireless laser printer, HP's best-value printer for automatic 2-sided printing
- Speed through tasks – Stay productive with a 250-sheet input tray and print speeds of up to 30 pages a minute from this monochrome laser printer
$399.99
Description
Design
The HP LaserJet Pro M118dw is an almost perfectly square box (14.6 wide by 16 deep) that sits about 9 inches high. Its compact footprint and lack of accessory trays and feeders will make it an unobtrusive addition to your home or office desktop.
There’s not much in the way of settings to tinker with on this printer. The sparse 3 button control panel with 3 LED status lights is a testament to that. The 3 buttons are for WPS (WiFi Protected Setup), Resume, and Cancel. The LED indicator lights are for Error, Ready, and Toner Low. Like I said, “Bare-bones.” Then again who needs fancy LED control panels when your printer has a built-in website that’s easier to use and understand and use than most printer control panels? See more on this in the “Setup” section.
HP LaserJet Pro M118dw Features
A feature you won’t find on many printers in this price range is auto-duplex printing. That means it will suck each page back into the printer and flip it over for you before sending it to the output tray. That’s the default. This saves time, hassle, and money in paper costs. The single tray supports both standard letter and legal-size paper. The front panel needs to remain open to allow for legal-sized paper to fit. Hidden away above the 1st tray is a manual feed tray that can be used for envelopes and labels. It’s easy to miss but it’s there and it works. In terms of connectivity, the M118dw is very flexible. It will support Ethernet, WiFi, WiFi Direct, and direct USB connections. In the web interface, you find settings to set up Google Cloud Print and Air Print as well. 
Performance
This is a relatively fast printer capable of printing up to 30ppm. That’s a page every 2 seconds. This will vary of course depending on the complexity of the pages you print. Text printing will get you closer to its maximum claimed speed while printing complex Adobe Acrobat documents will probably get you closer to 20ppm. Toner usage is about what you would expect from a printer in this class. Replacement cartridges are the HP94A with a 1,200-page yield and the HP94X which yields twice that. They go for around $46 and $85 respectively. If you do the math that comes out to around 3.5 cents per page. That’s nothing to sneeze at but high-volume printers that print for under 2 cents per page require much more of an initial investment than an entry-level printer like the HP LaserJet Pro M118dw.
HP LaserJet Pro M118dw Setup
The printer is easy to set up using USB or Ethernet. Most Windows 10 machines will recognize the drivers automatically. It can be set up on WiFi by using the web interface. Once you have the printer set up on an Ethernet connection simply use its IP address to access the wireless section of the web interface. You’ll need to select your WiFi network and enter the passphrase. Once that’s done simply unplug the Ethernet cable to “activate” WiFi. It’s that easy. The whole web interface thing has been known to throw people off because they’re accustomed to using mobile apps to set things up. The fact is it’s just as easy and a web interface offers much more control over your devices than most mobile apps. The use of web interfaces to set up network devices is discussed at length in my Free eBook. 
HP LaserJet Pro M118dw – Video
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Conclusion
The HP LaserJet Pro M118dw is an inexpensive, light-duty monochrome printer that can produce high-quality results if not pushed beyond its limits. If you simply want to print a few hundred pages a month and don’t want to make a huge initial investment this printer is a perfect choice. The auto-duplex feature is an added bonus from HP – a company that’s always trying to add more value to its printers without adding too much to the price.
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