HP’s LaserJet 1018 is a basic mono laser printer designed for individual use on a desk.

When it's not printing, it has a small footprint, about the size of a plastic folder. Fold down the front panel to produce a paper feed tray for up to 150 sheets.

There's no cover for the paper when the machine is in use, though, so you're obliged to fold it up in between print jobs, or risk dust in the mechanism.

The HP LaserJet 1018 has just two indicator lights on the printer's top surface, to show power and any error conditions, like paper-out or a jam. Everything else is controlled from the printer software on a computer.

Maintaining the LaserJet 1018 is a simple matter; just open the top cover and slide in the integral drum and toner cartridge. This drops in and rotates slightly before locking into place.

The cartridge is good for around 2,000 pages and with the best price we could find being £37, it gives a cost per page of 2.35p.

This is a reasonable figure for this class of laser printer and is somewhat lower than, for example, the Lexmark E120n that comes in at just under 3p per page.

It's horses for courses, though, and the Lexmark E120n wins out over the LaserJet in other areas, such as its provision of a networking socket as standard.

The LaserJet 1018 comes with only a USB 2 socket and no provision for adding a network card as an option. As a personal laser printer, this may not be a problem, but you might still want to network it on a home network.

Text print quality is very good, with crisp and dense black characters, though areas of tint, such as in backgrounds to business graphics, are not so good.

There's quite a bit of variation in tone, which can make text printed over graphics, such as in a diagram, hard to read.

Photographs suffer from this uneven print of tints, too, though this is not a major task for most laser printers.

The LaserJet 1018 prints quickly, at just under 10ppm, which is close to its rating of 12ppm.

In all, a basic, yet solid mono laser printer.

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