Having introduced the top-feed design for personal laser printers, with the LaserJet 4L, Hewlett Packard abandons it with this machine. Using a front feed tray, like the old LaserJet II and III printers, immediately gives the LaserJet 1000W a much bigger footprint. The tray, which takes up to 250 pages of 75gsm paper, sticks out by 180mm from the front face. Paper feeds to the top surface of the printer in the traditional way.

There's just a single, new-format parallel socket on the back, though a converter is supplied for a USB connection, too. Two minimalist indicators show power and data transfer but, as with some other printers in this group test, there are no buttons or other controls. Fortunately, software control is comprehensive from the Windows control panel and is logically laid out. HP provides drivers for all forms of Windows, including XP.

The all-in-one drum and toner cartridge is neat and fits well back inside the printer casing. It's rated at 2,500 sheets at 5 percent cover, which produces a cost per page of 2.5p, the second dearest in the group.

Print quality is good, with even fills showing little banding. Text print is clear and sharp, but we had trouble producing vector prints from CorelDraw 10. The printer was fond of reproducing only part of the image or just a blank sheet. We worked round the problem by choosing to rasterise the image before sending it to the printer, but with 2MB of internal memory in the LaserJet 1000W, printing vectors shouldn't have been a problem.