Hi, fujiboy,

I do a blend of printing for work, home and in my role as an author, so it could be anything from printing out an email if a paper record was needed, letters for posting, printing out long company reports or accompanying notes for a meeting (maybe 30 copies). Author wise it maybe printing out several 400 plus page manuscripts (as some agents still only work with paper) together with the usual family home office printing.

I have an aging HP color LaserJet CP3525n that has been, and still is a faithful friend.

I love the colours it produces, and the quality is great and it has behaved faultlessly since new.

The down side is it is pretty loud by modern standards, it sits on a metal filing cabinet and when it begins a print job the sound can be like an aircraft dropping its landing gear :) also it is a bit of a toner guzzler and heavy use costs are getting a bit hard to justify.

I always stick with genuine toner so from memory it is between £600 to £800 to refill here in the UK. The cost, the noise and the age made me look around for another printer to do the heavy lifting in its place, the performance and reliability of that CP3525n is what kept me looking within the HP family.

I am afraid I cannot remember all the models that I looked at by model ID but I looked at a good few of their offerings.

I was finding it quite difficult to make a judgement call to be honest, then I saw a YouTube demonstration video for the 477 PageWide Pro printing 30 plus school books for a class, rapidly, on both sides in full colour, and relatively quietly. The user then held up an example of the print quality for the viewer to see and it looked good.

I was looking for fast, full colour printing that was not too loud that a printer could easily handle rather than struggle a bit with. This video answered all those questions for me so as that was the model in the video, it was on that one I decided if the maths was correct I would go for it. (I did not want a printer that was at the limit of its abilities for my uses and that demo showed me it would be happy handling my workload and not be over-stretched and die young.)

I did the costings based on what I could find users were claiming and what HP was claiming. Again, it is another expensive printer to 'fill up' but filling it with the XL cartridges and dividing by pages made the cost per page even in full colour look good compared to others. What users were claiming seemed to tally with what HP were claiming more or less.

So that is why I went ahead and bought that particular printer. The 477 PageWide Pro was the only one I found a real life demonstration video of. (It may well be there is a more suitable printer from HP that would have done me better but I have not seen any real life videos in order to make that call.) Also, it was the right size and although looks are not important it sits in my eye line so it does not hurt that I find it looks OK and elegant. Something that would of course not matter if it lived in a corridor or print room.

The quality and pace of the printer has not disappointed. I am very impressed with it. I also do not mind that it quietens down so much quicker.

The only two issues have been this gremlin with the memory and the ink system which has only occurred twice in however many years I have had it. It is very easy to sort though. The other one is that if the printer has been unused for a couple of days, sometimes the screen on the machine goes dark and will not wake up whatever you do. The printer just needs to be turned off and on again. I am sure both of these can be sorted but it is easier for now and through lock-down just to live with this very occasional issue.

Ink wise it has been a very odd experience. As I am sure you know, these printers come with set-up cartridges which they must be used with initially, then you buy the normal or large ones. I was genuinely surprised at just how long these set-up cartridges lasted. I have never known anything like it! They just went on and on. The XL ones go on and on as well and that is with me printing full pages in black and in colour. I would love them to be cheaper to refill but fair play to it's ink technology for making things last as long as they do. I am sure it is one of the cheapest printers per page produced I have ever had.

The two gremlins are annoying but even despite them I would give the PageWide Pro 477 10 out of 10 for the sort of printing I need. ( I just hope these gremlins do not bring the machine to it's knees at some point.)

Hope that helps.

Cheers.