HP Pro M183fw All In One: In-Depth Review and User Opinions

The HP LaserJet Pro M183fw is an entry-level monochrome laser all-in-one printer aimed at home office and small business users. As an all-in-one, it provides functionality beyond just printing, including scanning, copying and fax capabilities. This allows it to act as a central hub for document management and workflow.

Some key features of the HP LaserJet Pro M183fw include:

• Laser printing for crisp, professional text quality
• Print speeds up to 19 pages per minute
• Built-in wireless networking for easy connectivity
• Automatic two-sided printing
• 150-sheet main input tray
• 35-sheet automatic document feeder for scanning and copying
• 2.7 inch color touchscreen control panel
• HP smartphone app for printing from mobile devices
• Compact size to fit on a desk

Overall, the M183fw is a reliable monochrome laser all-in-one suited for low to moderate print volumes in home and small offices seeking an affordable machine with essential functionality. This review will take a deeper look at the key strengths and weaknesses of this printer.

Design

The HP Pro M183fw has a compact and sleek design with a white finish. It measures 16.4 x 15.7 x 9.1 inches and weighs 14.8 pounds, making it a fairly lightweight and space-saving printer suitable for home offices or small businesses. Despite the small footprint, it doesn't feel flimsy or cheap. The plastic casing feels sturdy with no loose parts.

The printer has a simple and intuitive control panel on the front. It consists of a 2-line LCD screen to view settings and status messages, along with a keypad for navigation and making selections. The buttons have a nice tactile feedback when pressed. There is also a convenient USB port on the front to quickly print from a flash drive.

Overall, the clean aesthetics and streamlined design give the HP Pro M183fw an attractive look that will blend seamlessly into most work spaces. The compact size makes it easy to place on a desk without occupying too much surface area.

Print Quality

The HP M183fw prints documents with excellent quality thanks to its 1200 x 1200 dpi resolution and HP FastRes 1200 technology. This allows you to print sharp black text and vibrant color graphics.

It can print up to 21 pages per minute for black and white and up to 17 pages per minute for color. This makes it quite fast for an inkjet all-in-one printer. The pages come out quickly without sacrificing print quality.

The print engine is designed for reliability as well. It can print up to 15,000 pages per month, which is suitable for micro and small office use. The duty cycle of this printer ensures you can depend on it for your regular print jobs.

Overall, the print quality and speed of the HP M183fw make it a great choice for home offices, small businesses, and anywhere you need an affordable but capable color printer. The resolution and print engine allow you to print professional-looking documents and marketing materials.

Scanning

The HP M183fw all-in-one printer comes with a flatbed scanner that can scan documents and photos. The optical scan resolution is up to 1200 dpi, allowing you to capture fine details in your scans.

The scanner can scan documents at up to 21 ppm (pages per minute) in black and white, 15 ppm in color. So you can digitize multi-page documents quickly. Image enhancement features like auto-crop and auto-exposure help improve the quality of your scans.

You also get HP scanning software that lets you easily scan to your computer, email, cloud services, and more. Overall the scanning performance is quite good for an all-in-one printer at this price point. The high resolution scans have good detail and the scanning speeds are fast.

Copying

The HP M183fw delivers fast copying speeds and the convenience of automatic two-sided copying. It can produce up to 21 black and white copies per minute. For minimal hassle when making double-sided copies, the automatic document feeder can hold up to 35 sheets and supports duplex scanning and copying. Simply place your originals in the feeder and select the copy settings you want, including collate, resize, and more. The printer takes care of the rest, expeditiously producing one-sided or two-sided copies according to your preferences. With speeds up to 21 cpm and a 35-sheet ADF for effortless duplex copying, the M183fw makes it easy to quickly duplicate documents in both simplex and duplex modes.

Connectivity

The HP Pro M183fw offers several connectivity options to meet your needs.

For wired connectivity, it has a built-in Ethernet port that allows you to connect directly to your network with a LAN cable. This ensures a stable and reliable connection, which is ideal for office environments.

For wireless connectivity, the printer supports dual-band Wi-Fi (both 2.4GHz and 5GHz bands). Connecting over Wi-Fi gives you the flexibility to place the printer anywhere in your home or office, without needing to run wires.

In addition, the printer supports wireless direct printing, allowing you to connect your smartphone, tablet or laptop directly to the printer to print without accessing a network. This gives you easy wireless printing even for guest devices.

Finally, the HP Pro M183fw supports printing from the cloud via services such as Google Cloud Print, Apple Airprint and Mopria Print Service. You can print directly from cloud apps and services like Gmail, Dropbox and Evernote without needing print drivers.

Overall, the versatile connectivity options of the HP Pro M183fw, including Ethernet, Wi-Fi, Wireless Direct and cloud printing support, allow you to print however is most convenient depending on your needs.

Paper Handling

• Input and output paper handling are important aspects to consider for any printer. The HP M183fw has a 250-sheet main paper tray capacity, which is average for printers in this class. It also has a single-sheet priority feed slot that's useful for printing envelopes or other special media.

• The main paper tray is adjustable to accommodate letter or legal sized paper. Unfortunately there is no rear feed option for specialty paper like with higher-end laser printers. The M183fw prints to plain paper only and does not support photo paper or cardstock.

• For output, printed pages exit to a 100-sheet output tray on the top of the printer. There is no option to add extra paper trays to increase input capacity on this model. The main tray does have an automatic paper sensor that alerts you when paper is low.

• Overall the paper handling capabilities are adequate for home office or personal use, but may be limiting for high volume printing needs. The lack of specialty paper support is expected given the price point of this laser printer model.

Cartridges

The HP Pro M183fw comes with a starter toner cartridge that can print 700 pages. Replacement high-yield HP 26A cartridges can print 1,400 pages and cost around $50 each.

The printer uses separate black and tri-color cartridges, so you only need to replace the color that runs out rather than the whole set. The high-yield cartridges provide very competitive cost per page for both black and color printing.

Overall, the cartridge yields are good for a printer in this class and the replacement costs are reasonable. Being able to replace individual cartridges is a nice advantage over printers that use combined cartridges.

Software

The HP Pro M183fw comes with the HP Smart app, which allows you to print, scan, and manage your printer from your smartphone or tablet. Some key features of the HP Smart app include:

• Remote printing - You can print from anywhere by sending documents and photos directly to your printer from the app.

• Scanning - The app lets you scan directly from the printer to your mobile device's camera roll or cloud services like Dropbox and Google Drive.

• Printer management - You can check ink levels, order supplies, change settings, and troubleshoot issues with your printer using the intuitive app interface.

• Print previews - View how your documents will print before sending them to the printer. You can make adjustments like changing page orientation within the preview.

• Printing customization - Options like two-sided printing, color/black & white, page range selection, and more can be configured before printing.

• Document sharing - Easily share scanned or printed documents from your phone via email, text, cloud services, and other apps.

The HP Smart app provides a seamless mobile printing and scanning experience. With remote printing capabilities and printer management tools, it's a handy accompaniment to the HP Pro M183fw printer.

Conclusion

The HP LaserJet Pro M183fw is an affordable all-in-one monochrome laser printer suitable for home office and small business use. It provides fast printing speeds up to 28ppm, automatic two-sided printing, wireless networking and mobile printing capabilities.

The printer offers decent print quality for text and graphics, though its resolution of 600 x 600 dpi means fine details and grayscale images won't be as sharp as on more expensive laser printers. Copy and scan features are suitable for basic needs, but lack higher-end options like scanning to the cloud or optical character recognition.

On the plus side, the printer is very easy to set up and use with the user-friendly control panel and HP Smart app. Connectivity options like WiFi Direct and Bluetooth allow flexible wireless printing from mobile devices. It supports a variety of paper sizes and types, and toner is affordably priced.

The main downsides are mediocre photo printing quality, lack of color printing, slow single-sided print speeds of up to 19ppm, and no option for higher capacity toner cartridges. Lack of an automatic document feeder for the scanner is also inconvenient for multipage jobs.

Overall, the M183fw is a reasonably priced, capable monochrome laser all-in-one that should meet the needs of many home and small office users looking for an easy-to-use printer with fast duplex printing and wireless connectivity. Just don't expect too much in terms of copy/scan features or top-notch print quality for photos and graphics.