Canon imageCLASS LBP151dw review – CNET

The Good The Canon LBP151DW is adept at printing high quality text documents with respectable print speeds. With the help of its 802.11 b/g/n Wi-Fi print server, it can also connect to the cloud to print directly from mobile devices and Google Chrome Web browsers.

The Bad The printer can’t scan or copy documents; doesn’t support Apple AirPrint; the toner refills are more expensive than average.

The Bottom Line The Canon LBP151DW is a competent workhorse laser printer, but rival models offer more features and lower ink costs for the same price.

Single-function printers — those without scanning or copying capability — are a rare species these days, but a simple monochrome laser printer like the Canon imageCLASS LBP151dw ($169, £119, AU$230) is all you really need if you print mostly text documents and don’t have a need for color output. The printer is fast to spit out jobs and it’s great for connecting to a variety of computers and mobile devices. But printers are ultimately judged by the cost of their consumables, and the LBP151dw will ultimately cost you a lot more to refill the toner than competing devices.

Canon imageCLASS LBP151dw
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Design

The imageCLASS LBP151dw is your basic black box of a printer. You can load 250 sheets of basic white paper into the tray on the bottom, or you can also feed different types of media like card stock or envelopes into the manual feed tray.

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Canon imageCLASS LBP151dw

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The unit measures 15.4-inches (39.1 cm) wide, 13.2-inches (33.5 cm) deep and 9.7-inches (24.6 cm) tall, which means it’s bigger than the HP LaserJet Pro P1102W and not quite as compact as the Brother HL-L2360DW, but it should still fit just fine on a small desk without taking up too much space.

There’s no display on the front so you can’t monitor the progress of a multi-page job, but that’s to be expected for a monolaser printer. There is, however, an indicator button that lights up on the control panel if you’re out of paper, or if there’s a jam to clear. To that end, I never experienced a single paper jam in the few days I spent testing the Canon.

Canon imageCLASS LBP151dw

Features

The LBP151dw was designed for the economic-minded and has a built-in auto-duplexer, which is just a fancy way of saying that it can flip a sheet and print on both sides before spitting out the paper.