The Pantum P3012DW has a low enough price—$139.99 or less from retailers like Amazon, though the company says it has no list price—to define it as a basic, entry-level monochrome laser printer, but it delivers quite a lot more than you might expect. It offers more connection options than the HP Neverstop Laser 1001nw and Lexmark MS431dw, which are both Editors’ Choice award winners and also more expensive. The Pantum also provides automatic duplexing, which the HP lacks, along with higher paper capacity. Its cost per page is a bit higher than typical and considerably higher than the Neverstop’s, but whether that will be an issue depends on how many pages you expect to print. For a low-volume small office, the P3012DW might be just the ticket.
Mostly Easy Setup, Plenty of Connection Choices
Pantum, an emerging Chinese company, isn’t a particularly well-known brand, but its printers have been around since 2010. We reviewed and liked a Pantum laser printer as long ago as 2013, and the company has a firm foothold in the budget mono laser market. This is another strong entry in its stable of personal laser printers.
Setting up printers of this sort tends to be simple, since they’re small and there’s only one toner cartridge to deal with. This mostly holds true for the P3012DW, though the printer drum is separate from the toner instead of included in the same cartridge. To set up the device, you remove a tray that holds both the drum and toner cartridge, pull a protective sheet off the drum, remove the toner cartridge from the tray, pull a plastic tab that keeps the toner in place during shipping, then snap the cartridge back in the tray and replace the tray in the printer.
You can easily position the P3012DW almost anywhere you like; measuring 9.1 by 13.9 by 13.1 inches (HWD) and weighing 15 pounds, it’s small enough to share your desk. However, you can place it elsewhere in your office and easily connect via Ethernet, Wi-Fi, or Wi-Fi Direct. There’s also a USB port and NFC support for mobile devices. The control panel near the top right front corner consists of a two-line LCD, two status lights, and a few buttons for moving though menus.
The printer’s single paper drawer holds up to 250 sheets of letter- or legal-size stock, making it suitable for most home offices and one- to three-person workgroups. A single-sheet multipurpose tray lets you feed letterhead or other special-purpose media without having to change the paper in the drawer.
The Pantum’s recommended monthly duty cycle is 750 to 3,500 pages, but if you regularly print more than about 1,000 pages a month (about 50 per business day), refilling the tray can quickly become an unwelcome chore. Note, too, that with its high-capacity cartridge installed, the printer’s estimated cost per page is 2.8 cents, compared to, for instance, 1.8 cents for the Lexmark MS431dw. If you expect to print just 20,000 pages over the life of the printer, saving a penny per page will more than cover the Lexmark’s higher purchase price.
For this review, I connected the P3012DW via Ethernet. Driver installation was both easy and old-school, which is to say that Pantum supplies the drivers and installation routine on a CD (although the quick setup guide also gives instructions for downloading the software from the company’s website). The one-click setup routine simply asks you to select between a USB, Wi-Fi, or Ethernet connection.
Mobile App Printing Woes
You can also print from a mobile device, connecting by Wi-Fi or, in the absence of a shared network, Wi-Fi Direct. Unfortunately, I found setup for mobile printing more problematical than its PC equivalent. A separate user guide for mobile printing tells you how to download the required app, then instructs you to print a Wi-Fi Wizard page and use the app to scan a QR code on it. But it doesn’t tell you how to print the page (the answer, available in an online video, is to press a Wi-Fi button on the front panel).
I managed to fumble through establishing a Wi-Fi Direct connection even without instructions, proving that the mobile printing feature works and can be useful once you know to press the Wi-Fi button to get it set up. As mentioned, the printer also supports NFC for devices running Android 4.4 and later, but Pantum says it doesn’t work with all Android 11 devices. When I tried using it with my Samsung Galaxy S20 FE 5G, it worked to the point of automatically launching the mobile app on the phone when I touched the latter to the NFC tag, but it failed to establish the connection needed for printing.
Decent Speed, Good Text Quality
Rated at 32 pages per minute (ppm), the P3012DW proved only a little slower than its more costly competition in our tests. It averaged 24.8ppm when printing our 12-page Microsoft Word file, making it 2 to 5ppm slower (a hardly noticeable two to five seconds more for the 12 pages) than the HP LaserJet Pro M404dn, Lexmark MS431dw, or Lexmark B3442dw.
Printing our full suite of business documents, the Pantum managed 17.9ppm, which was 2.6 to 5.1ppm slower than most competitors but a bit quicker than the HP Neverstop 1001nw. It took an average of 9 seconds to print our 4-by-6-inch photos.
Output quality varied from admirable for text to mediocre for graphics and photos. Text offered crisp, clean edges and was easily readable even at 4 points for fonts likely to be used in business documents, while one of the two highly stylized fonts with heavy strokes that we test was easily readable at 8 points. The other font, which is harder to render well, closed up space within and between characters, making anything smaller than 12-point text hard to read.
As for photos and graphics, I’d call the P3012DW’s quality good enough to clearly convey an image, but not good enough to give to an important client or customer. Thin lines were lost or broken, and both graphics and photos showed banding, uneven pile height in dark fills, and easily visible dithering patterns.
A Potentially Strong Contender
The Pantum P3012DW offers a good deal, starting with a lower price than most other personal lasers. It’s a little slower than most, but you’re not likely to notice unless you’re printing lengthy documents. It’s more seriously limited by a relatively low paper capacity (with no optional trays or drawers for expansion) and a higher cost per page than most of the printers mentioned here.
If your print volume is more than moderate, take a look at the HP LaserJet Pro M404dn, Lexmark B3442dw or B3340dw, or the Editors’ Choice-winning Lexmark MS431dw. The choice between them will largely depend on how much you expect to print and how that will affect the total cost of ownership. If you can make do with manual rather than automatic duplexing and a single 150-sheet input tray, be sure to also consider another Editors’ Choice honoree, the HP Neverstop Laser 1001nw. It was the slowest in this group in our tests, but its per-page cost is an incredibly low 0.3 cent, potentially saving you hundreds of dollars over its lifetime. But if you need a bit more capacity than the Neverstop and won’t be printing enough pages to fret about running costs, the Pantum may be the right choice.
