Pantum P2000 review

In an already crowded laser printer market, is there really room for another vendor? Chinese company Pantum thinks so, and its opening gambit is to shoot for the SMB and SoHo sectors where value is king.

The P2000 is well built for such a cheap printer. It has a solid-steel internal chassis, and its paper rollers are mounted on metal as opposed to plastic bars. A monthly duty cycle of 20,000 pages means it’s up for the rigours of a busy office.

The P2000’s running costs are low. The high-capacity 2,300-page toner cartridge delivers a page for only 2p – the lowest we’ve seen from a £50 laser printer. Costs will initially be much higher, though, as the printer ships with only a 700-page starter cartridge.

Installation of this GDI printer on a Windows 7 host was simple: we simply loaded the drivers and connected the printer via USB. The driver has basic but useful features, with options for multipage prints, 2 x 2 posters, watermarks, a draft mode and manual duplexing.

The P2000 handled our speed tests well, with a 20-page Word document dropping into the upper output tray in 60 seconds at both 600dpi and 1,200dpi resolutions. It printed our 24-page DTP test more slowly, at 13.5ppm.

For general text documents, output quality is fine, with pin-sharp fonts across a wide range of sizes. That’s the limit of this printer, though, as charts and graphs suffered unsightly banding; photos also lacked detail in darker areas.

In such a competitive market, the P2000 does remarkably well, with low running costs, sturdy build quality and a cheap price. However, the below-par print quality hobbles its appeal.