HP’s latest Color LaserJet Pro printer works great, but costs too much

HP released a group of new color laser printers — the 3000 series in 2024 — and I went hands-on with the Color LaserJet Pro MFP 3301fdw to test how well it works.

As one of the best printer brands, HP makes reliable and durable products, so I wanted to dig into the specifics of this particular model to find out if it’s a good value for small businesses and home offices.

Design

HP’s Color LaserJet Pro MFP 3301fdw is compact for a multifunction color laser printer. The design uses a mix of grays and off-whites to blend in at the office or at home.

Laser printers are always bulkier than inkjets, and an automatic document feeder (ADF) adds several inches in height. The 16.5-by-16.5-inch all-in-one stands 13.4 inches tall and includes scan, copy, fax, and print capabilities. The weight is manageable at 37.7 pounds but solid enough to prevent vibration.

An adjustable 4.5-inch color touchscreen makes navigating menus easy. When standing, it tilts back as far at 35 degrees above horizontal. If you want to use the touchscreen while seated, it raises to 67 degrees for comfortable viewing. A USB-A port allows for walk-up printing.

The Color LaserJet Pro MFP 3301fdw has a 250-sheet main paper tray and a media slot that’s convenient for envelopes and labels. The slot isn’t quite as nice as a tray, since paper or envelopes aren’t supported. However, it’s a good design overall.

Printing performance

The Color LaserJet Pro MFP 3301fdw feels snappy since the first page rolls out in under 11 seconds. Sustained speed is a bit slower than competing solutions, and HP rates it at 26 pages per minute (ppm) for monochrome and color documents. Brother’s similarly priced HL-L3295CDW is quicker with a 31-ppm throughput, but it takes two seconds longer for the first page.

Print quality is excellent for documents. Black text it sharp even in fine print, and color documents look vibrant with good contrast. In fact, the contrast is a little too strong.

In photographs, I noticed the shadowy areas lose detail, and images look a bit darker than the original picture. Like most laser printers, HP’s Color LaserJet Pro MFP 3301fdw can’t print borderless images.

If you print photos often, an inkjet printer will handle the job better but not as quickly as a color laser printer.

Special features

HP gave the Color LaserJet Pro MFP 3301fdw a very nice ADF to facilitate multi-document scanning, copying, and faxing. That’s important for an office.

It’s quite fast since it handles double-sided pages in a single pass. Copying is even faster than printing, with the first page hitting the output bin in under 10 seconds. The sustained rate is 26 copies per minute for simplex and 16 per minute for duplex.

While the ADF is limited to 300 dots per inch (dpi), the flatbed scanner supports up to 1,200 dpi, which is useful for scanning detailed photographs or capturing fine print for optical character recognition.

The USB-A port below the display let me scan to and print from a thumb drive. I had to push quite firmly to get the printer to recognize my USB drive, but it worked well otherwise.

I don’t have a landline to test the fax, but that technology is well-established, and facsimiles shouldn’t pose any problems for HP.

Software and compatibility

The HP Color LaserJet Pro MFP 3301fdw was easy to set up. All four toner cartridges come preinstalled and dual-band Wi-Fi quickly found my network. In just a few minutes, the printer was ready to use.

Windows and Mac computers instantly recognize the HP Color LaserJet Pro MFP 3301fdw and download the drivers if needed. I connected via Wi-Fi, but there are ports on the back for USB and Ethernet cables if you want to connect directly to the printer.

On mobile devices, the HP Smart app is intuitive and works well for most things. There wasn’t a way to print envelopes from the app, but I managed to get the job done using AirPrint.

HP also limits mobile scanning to 300 dpi, while I can select up to 1,200 dpi when I scan to a computer. I’m not a fan of arbitrary limitations. Epson allows 600 dpi scans to mobile from the EcoTank Pro ET-5850, an inkjet that’s nearly as fast as the Color LaserJet Pro MFP 3301fdw.

Price

HP sells the Color LaserJet Pro MFP 3301fdw for $529, a surprisingly high price for this midrange printer. The much faster and all-around better HP Color LaserJet Pro 4301fdw retailed for $699 in 2023, but you can often find it on sale for less than $500. HP just introduced the Color LaserJet Pro MFP 3301fdw in 2024, so I expect it will drop in price over time.

Toner costs are always a consideration for color laser printers. HP includes starter cartridges that provide about 600 monochrome pages and 500 color pages.

That won’t last long. Fortunately, HP’s Color LaserJet Pro MFP 3301fdw can accept high-yield toner cartridges that last longer and have lower material costs.

A standard black cartridge prints an average of 1,300 pages and costs about 3 cents per page. A high-capacity cartridge lasts much longer, up to 3,200 pages, and lowers cost per page (cpp) to 5 cents.

The savings are more notable for color documents. Standard color cartridges deliver 1,200 pages at 14 cents cpp, while high-yield toner cartridges last for about 2,500 pages at 20 cents per page.

Of course, you pay more upfront for the larger cartridges, but the savings add up over months and years of printing.

Is this the printer for you?

It’s good to keep an eye on the Color LaserJet Pro MFP 3301fdw. It’s a smaller, lighter color laser printer than heavy-duty printers like the Canon imageClass MF753cdw. While it can’t match the performance of last year’s discounted models, it could fit nicely into the sweet spot for home offices when it starts getting discounted.

The speed is good, quality is nice, and it’s rated for up to 40,000 pages per month, so you have room to grow. The TerraJet toner HP’s Color LaserJet Pro MFP 3301fdw uses is more ecofriendly than most toners also.

For more options, check out our guides to the best color laser printers and best all-in-one printers to find the right choice for your home office or small business.