We review products independently, but we may earn affiliate commissions from buying links on this page. Terms of use. HP's $99.99 LaserJet Pro M15w is an entry-level personal monochrome laser printer for use in small and home-based offices, student dormitories and bedrooms, and just about any place else where space is limited. The M15w is the smallest laser printer we've seen to date. It prints well overall and is fast given its low price, but its running costs are high enough to relegate it to low-volume use. Its unique size and HP's Smart Task mobile device integration, though, set it off into a class all its own, making it our top choice as a light-duty personal laser printer. Smaller Than a Breadbox At 6.3 by 13.6 by 7.5 inches (HWD) with its trays closed and weighing 8.4 pounds, you can put the M15w just about anywhere. One of its closest competitors, the Editors' Choice Brother HL-L2370DW, is nearly twice as long and heavy, and while there are family oriented and home-based inkjet all-in-one (AIO) printers close in size and weight to the M15w, none of them are single-function monochrome laser machines, and therefore are entirely different animals. From a hardware standpoint, everything about the M15w is simple—right down to its three-button control panel, shown here. The three options are Power, Cancel, and WPS (Wi-Fi Protected Setup) for initializing a one-touch connection to your wireless network. Each button also has a corresponding LED status indicator. As with most business-oriented printers, and especially laser printers, you can also configure and monitor the unit and generate reports from the M15w's built-in web server, shown below. Paper handling consists of one 150-sheet tray that folds down from the front of the device. The Brother HL-L2370DW, on the other hand, holds 251 sheets split between a 250-sheet cassette and a one-sheet override tray. Printed pages land on a 100-sheet bin atop of the printer, as shown here. The M15w's maximum monthly duty cycle is 8,000 pages, with a 1,000-page recommended monthly print volume. Connectivity and Smart Tasks The M15w is one of the very few laser printers that I've seen without an Ethernet port. What you do get by way of standard interfaces are Wi-Fi and connecting to a single PC via USB 2.0, and Apple AirPrint, Google Cloud Print, Mopria, Wi-Fi Direct, and HP Smart App facilitate mobile connectivity. Smart App, in addition to providing a uniform interface across multiple platforms for connecting to and managing your printer, also gives you access to HP's Smart Tasks, which are workflow profiles that shorten multistep activities down to tapping or clicking an icon. Smart Tasks also allow you to use your smartphone or tablet camera as a scanner, and you can in turn print the "scan" as a full-size document on your HP printer, a feature HP first introduced on its Tango and Tango X printers a while back. Canon's recent home and family oriented Pixma TS702 photo printer supports similar smartphone-camera-to-printer copying, too, and I suspect that we'll see tighter mobile device integration along the same lines from several printer manufacturers, soon. With HP's Smart Tasks, you can also render a process comprising several steps, such as capturing a document with your smartphone and sending it to several destinations—the printer, the cloud, email, and so on—down to one shortcut. Entry-Level Speed HP rates the M15w at 19 pages per minute (ppm), which is precisely what I clocked it at during the first phase of our speed tests, where I printed our 12-page Microsoft Word text test document several times and averaged the results. (I tested the M15w over USB 2.0 from our standard Intel Core i5-equipped testbed PC running Windows 10 Professional.) While that's fast compared with portable printers we've reviewed, most larger entry-level monochrome laser printers are significantly faster. The Brother HL-L2370DW mentioned earlier, for example, pushed out the same test pages at 33ppm. See How We Test Printers Next, I printed several complex Acrobat, Excel, and PowerPoint documents containing charts, graphs, and other intricate business graphics. Then, I combined that score with the results from printing the 12-page text document in the previous test and came up with a score of 12.2ppm for churning out our entire suite of test documents. Here, the M15w's performance was much closer to its entry-level counterparts. The HL-L2370DW, for instance, managed 14.4ppm on this portion of our speed test regimen. Very Good Output Quality Given the M15w's relatively low resolution of 600 by 600 dpi, output quality is surprisingly good. But then that resolution is plenty high enough for producing good-looking text, which monochrome laser printers are primarily designed to print. I inspected the M15w's text output thoroughly and didn't find any problems, in terms of character shape, spacing, fuzziness, or any other common flaws, making its text output suitable for most business applications. The M15w did a decent job with our full-page Excel charts and graphs and PowerPoint handouts, too. It struggled a little with some of the complex gradients, in that I saw some graininess and the transitions from one tone to the next were not exactly fluid. I was surprised at how well the M15w printed our test photos. Close inspection revealed some graininess and fewer shades of gray available at higher resolutions, but the images overall looked good. But then, if you're looking for a machine to print photos on, even grayscale images, you're reading the wrong review. Low-Volume Running Costs I wouldn't expect a laser printer that costs less than $100 to have low running costs, but the M15w's 5-cent cost per page is about 1.5 cents higher than most other entry-level monochrome laser printers. In other words, were you actually to print its recommended monthly print volume of 1,000 pages, the M15w will cost you about $15 more per month to use than most comparable models, including the Brother HL-L2370DW. That may not sound like much, but at that rate, it would take only three to four months to make up the difference between the cost of the M15w and the HL-L2370DW. Small and Convenient The M15w is all about the size: You can toss it in just about any office and it will go virtually unnoticed. It's also small and light enough to take with you to trade shows, soccer league tryouts, and so on. Granted, this is a niche machine that's expensive to use if you're printing a lot of pages, but if small, convenient, and inexpensive-to-buy are what you're looking for, the LaserJet Pro M15w is our Editors' Choice personal monochrome laser printer. HP LaserJet Pro M15w Bottom Line: The HP LaserJet Pro M15w is an excellent, inexpensive, and tiny monochrome laser printer that's as easy to use on the road as it is to tuck away in a small office.

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