The HP Color Laser MFP 179fnw ($299.99) is a relatively inexpensive entry-level multifunction laser printer designed for home-based and micro office use.
HP dubs it the "world's smallest in its class," and its compact size does make it a good fit for space-strapped offices.
However, it lacks some of the key features of our two entry-level Editors' Choice color laser AIOs, the Canon Color imageClass MF634Cdw and the Brother MFC-L3770CDW, including automatic two-sided printing, and during testing it struggled with some of our more complex business graphics.
Even so, it has a relatively low purchase price and prints well overall, making it a decent fit for individuals and small work teams with very light print and copy volumes.
Small, Light, and Convenient
Measuring 13.6 by 16 by 14.3 inches (HWD) and weighing only 31.1 pounds, the 179fnw is leaner by a few inches in all directions, and at least 10 pounds lighter, than the competitors mentioned earlier.
Close in size and girth, even a little smaller and lighter, is HP's own LaserJet Pro MFP M180nw, another of the company's compact lasers meant for individuals or small groups of users.
Granted, all these machines are designed to share desktops or otherwise minimize the space they require, but the 179fnw and M180nw have the smallest footprints, hands down.
The 179fnw comes with a 40-page manual-duplexing automatic document feeder (ADF) for scanning, copying, and faxing multipage documents.
That's 10 pages fewer than the ADFs on both the Canon MF634Cdw and the Brother MFC-L3770CDW.
The HP M180nw has no ADF at all, which is the primary reason it's slightly smaller and a few pounds lighter than the 179fnw.
Manual-duplexing means that the 179fnw cannot scan two-sided documents without you having to turn the stack of originals over to capture the other sides.
Both the MF634Cdw and the MFC-L3770CDW have single-pass auto-duplexing ADFs that contain two scanning sensors for capturing both sides of two-sided documents simultaneously.
If you scan even a few stacks of multipage two-sided documents each month, the ability to leave the scanner unattended is a huge convenience, and well worth the extra hundred dollars or so you'd spend on either the Brother or Canon models mentioned here.
In any case, if you plan to make a lot of two-sided copies, the 179fnw's print engine doesn't support automatic two-sided printing either, making auto-duplexing on its ADF sort of a moot point.
Certain tasks such as making copies, faxing, and tweaking the configuration and security settings are executed from the 179fnw's control panel, which is somewhat of an old-school collection of numerous buttons, status LEDs, and a number pad, anchored by a two-line monochrome readout-style LCD.
Productivity functions such as making copies or sending faxes are, for the most part, set up and executed from their own set of buttons and keys, making them reasonably straightforward and simple.
Tasks like making network and other configuration changes, setting security options, and generating usage reports, though, often require navigating multiple layers of drill-down menus on the LCD via four arrow keys and an accompanying OK button.
Granted, users have navigated these types of control panels for several years, but that doesn't make them as easy to use as this century's color graphics touchscreens, which come on several of the 179fnw's entry-level competitors, especially the MF634Cdw with its comfortably spacious 5-inch display.
The good news: Like most printers (especially business-oriented models), the 179fnw supplements the control panel with easier access to its configuration, monitoring (including consumables), report generating, viewing, and printing features via a built-in web server, shown here.
The 179fnw's paper handling and input capacity, which (like on its LaserJet Pro M180nw sibling) consists of one 150-sheet cassette and a 50-sheet output tray (100 sheets on the M180nw), doesn't get much more entry-level.
Canon's MF634Cdw provides increased versatility by including a 1-sheet override tray for printing one-off envelopes and other media that might require emptying the main cassette and reconfiguring it.
Meanwhile, the Brother MFC-L3770CDW's 250-sheet main drawer and 30-sheet override tray hold almost twice as much paper as these other models.
HP rates the 179fnw's maximum monthly duty cycle at 20,000 pages, with a meager recommended monthly print volume of 100 to 500 pages.
Both the M180nw's and the MFC-L3770CDW's duty cycles are 10,000 pages higher.
But HP and Brother rate the recommended print volumes, the more pertinent and informative of these two specs, at 1,500 pages.
The MF634Cdw, with an 18,000-pages-higher duty cycle and recommended volume five times that of the 179fnw, is the most robust of this bunch.
Connections, Security, and Productivity Software
The 179fnw's out-of-the-box connectivity interfaces are Ethernet 10/100Based-Tx, connection to a single PC with USB 2.0, dual-band Wi-Fi, and Wi-Fi Direct.
Wi-Fi Direct is a peer-to-peer network protocol that allows you to connect your tablet or smartphone directly to the printer without either them or it being connected to a local network.
You also get additional functionality via HP's Smart App.
In addition to providing a similar interface across all platforms, the HP Smart App provides enhanced mobile support with features like scanning to the printer with your smartphone and setting up workflow profiles for repetitive tasks such as scanning to the cloud and other destinations.
Other mobile features include Apple AirPrint, Google Cloud Print, and Mopria.
One of the latest trends for consumer-grade and small-business printers and AIOs these days is voice activation, or, in this case, what HP calls HP Voice-Activated Printing, with built-in support for Amazon Alexa, Google Assistant, and Microsoft Cortana.
Adding support for other voice or Smart Home services, including Apple's Siri or Samsung's Bixby and any other service that supports IFTTT (if this, then that) scripting, is straightforward.
You can find instructions, as well as several useful scripts, at IFTTT.com.
Security on the 179fnw consists primarily of the ability to password protect the embedded Web server mentioned earlier and to disable network ports to block unwanted traffic.
And, of course, you can filter IP and MAC addresses.
But missing are features like Secure Print for protecting documents with PINs and Department IDs for restricting access to specific functions and to the printer itself via usernames and passwords.
In addition to the standard printer and scanner drivers, HP includes its HP MFP Scan, HP LJ Network PC-Fax, and an optical character recognition (OCR) utility for converting scanned images of text to editable text.
Entry-Level Performance
HP rates the 179fnw at 19 pages per minute (ppm) for monochrome pages and 4ppm for color pages.
The monochrome page rating is on the low end of average for entry-level laser printers, but the 4ppm color page rating is one of the lowest I've seen.
To assess how well the 179fnw performs compared with other entry-level color printers, I tested it over an Ethernet connection from our standard Intel Core i5 PC running Windows 10 Professional.
See How We Test Printers
The 179fnw churned our 12-page Microsoft Word text document at an average rate of 18.9ppm, essentially matching HP's rating.
The 179fnw's M180nw sibling came in at 3.5ppm slower, while Canon's MF634Cdw managed 7.9ppm faster.
Brother's MFC-L3770CDW matched the 179fnw's score, and the Editors' Choice Epson WorkForce Pro WF-C5790, a midrange inkjet laser alternative, printed the same 12 pages at an average rate of 24.4ppm.
The next phase in our benchmarking regimen entailed printing several color Adobe Acrobat documents, Excel spreadsheets and accompanying charts and graphs, and PowerPoint handouts comprised of a mixture of complex business graphics and text in various colors, typefaces, and point sizes.
Then, I combined the results from these tests with those from printing the 12-page text document in the previous test and came up with a score of 5.3ppm for churning out our 26-page suite of test documents.
That score, though it beats HP's color page rating by 1.3ppm, is by far the lowest I've seen for a laser printer.
Even HP's M180nw sibling managed to churn out our test documents 4.7ppm faster, and Canon's MF634Cdw beat the 179fnw by 5.3ppm.
Brother's MFC-L3770CDW came in 5ppm ahead of today's HP test unit, and the WF-C5790 score of 17.7ppm trounced all the laser machines mentioned here.
While laser printers are not the machines of choice for printing photos, I clocked the 179fnw as it printed our vibrantly colorful and highly detailed 4-by-6-inch snapshots.
It turned in an average time of 27 seconds per image, which is several seconds slower than the other AIOs mentioned here, but still better than acceptable.
Mixed Output Quality
The 179fnw's output quality on most of our test documents was good, but it did struggle with some of the more complex full-page Excel charts and PowerPoint handouts containing dark and gradient backgrounds.
Especially notable is the banding in a dark green to black gradient background that several of the printers we've tested over the years have had trouble with, and I also saw some banding in a dark-blue background on a PowerPoint handout.
Surprisingly, though, the documents containing solid black backgrounds came out without any notable toner distribution issues.
These output flaws were not rampant among our test documents, but instead intermittent, though consistent on each copy of the same page I printed.
Text, on the other hand, came out looking above average, with well-shaped characters and highly legible fonts down to 4 points, the smallest point size we test.
Photos were accurately colored and vibrant, while the detail was above average for a laser printer, and therefore appropriate for most business applications.
Expensive to Use
Entry-level laser printers, especially compared with some of their inkjet competitors, are relatively expensive to use.
The 179fnw has, at 6.2 cents per monochrome page and 29 cents per color page, some of the highest running expenses I've seen recently and costs about twice as much to use as most other entry-level color laser printers.
Canon's MF634Cdw, for example, delivers running costs of 3.2 cents for black pages and 16.4 cents per color print.
Brother's MFC-L3770CDW monochrome cost per page is, at 2.6 cents, lower still, as is its color per-page cost of 15.5-cents.
The Epson WF-C5790, even though it lists for the same price as the 179fnw, prints monochrome pages for as low as 1.7 cents and color pages for about 7.7 cents.
If you're printing and copying several hundred to a few thousand pages each month, especially color pages, these cost-per-page numbers can mean the difference between several hundred and a few thousand dollars over the life of the printer.
The more you print, the more critical it is to choose a printer with reasonable per-page costs.
With that said, HP's 100 to 500 page suggested monthly volume does indicate that the 179fnw is designed for low-volume environments.
However, given the per-page cost of toner for this machine, printing more than 100 pages or so each month is an expensive proposition.
The more your estimated print volume exceeds that number, the more you should probably consider one of the other models mentioned here.
Best for Low-Volume Printing
The 179fnw is a relatively inexpensive color laser AIO designed for low-volume output in home-based and micro offices where space is at a premium.
Even so, for the $100-list-price difference between it and its much beefier and feature-rich competitors, you give up a lot, such as an auto-duplexing ADF and print engine and much lower running costs, as well as banding-free print quality with certain types of business graphics.
If these features are essential to you, consider the Editors' Choice Canon MF634Cdw or Brother MFC-L3770CDW.
If, however, all you or your small work team need is to print or copy 100 pages or so each month, this small color laser AIO might be a good fit.
HP Color Laser MFP 179fnw
Cons
Lacks automatic two-sided printing, copying, and scanning.
Low recommended volume rating.
High running costs.
The Bottom Line
The HP Color Laser MFP 179fnw is a simple entry-level color laser AIO with performance and features that are best suited for printing or copying in low-volume offices.
The HP Color Laser MFP 179fnw ($299.99) is a relatively inexpensive entry-level multifunction laser printer designed for home-based and micro office use.
HP dubs it the "world's smallest in its class," and its compact size does make it a good fit for space-strapped offices.
However, it lacks some of the key features of our two entry-level Editors' Choice color laser AIOs, the Canon Color imageClass MF634Cdw and the Brother MFC-L3770CDW, including automatic two-sided printing, and during testing it struggled with some of our more complex business graphics.
Even so, it has a relatively low purchase price and prints well overall, making it a decent fit for individuals and small work teams with very light print and copy volumes.
Small, Light, and Convenient
Measuring 13.6 by 16 by 14.3 inches (HWD) and weighing only 31.1 pounds, the 179fnw is leaner by a few inches in all directions, and at least 10 pounds lighter, than the competitors mentioned earlier.
Close in size and girth, even a little smaller and lighter, is HP's own LaserJet Pro MFP M180nw, another of the company's compact lasers meant for individuals or small groups of users.
Granted, all these machines are designed to share desktops or otherwise minimize the space they require, but the 179fnw and M180nw have the smallest footprints, hands down.
The 179fnw comes with a 40-page manual-duplexing automatic document feeder (ADF) for scanning, copying, and faxing multipage documents.
That's 10 pages fewer than the ADFs on both the Canon MF634Cdw and the Brother MFC-L3770CDW.
The HP M180nw has no ADF at all, which is the primary reason it's slightly smaller and a few pounds lighter than the 179fnw.
Manual-duplexing means that the 179fnw cannot scan two-sided documents without you having to turn the stack of originals over to capture the other sides.
Both the MF634Cdw and the MFC-L3770CDW have single-pass auto-duplexing ADFs that contain two scanning sensors for capturing both sides of two-sided documents simultaneously.
If you scan even a few stacks of multipage two-sided documents each month, the ability to leave the scanner unattended is a huge convenience, and well worth the extra hundred dollars or so you'd spend on either the Brother or Canon models mentioned here.
In any case, if you plan to make a lot of two-sided copies, the 179fnw's print engine doesn't support automatic two-sided printing either, making auto-duplexing on its ADF sort of a moot point.
Certain tasks such as making copies, faxing, and tweaking the configuration and security settings are executed from the 179fnw's control panel, which is somewhat of an old-school collection of numerous buttons, status LEDs, and a number pad, anchored by a two-line monochrome readout-style LCD.
Productivity functions such as making copies or sending faxes are, for the most part, set up and executed from their own set of buttons and keys, making them reasonably straightforward and simple.
Tasks like making network and other configuration changes, setting security options, and generating usage reports, though, often require navigating multiple layers of drill-down menus on the LCD via four arrow keys and an accompanying OK button.
Granted, users have navigated these types of control panels for several years, but that doesn't make them as easy to use as this century's color graphics touchscreens, which come on several of the 179fnw's entry-level competitors, especially the MF634Cdw with its comfortably spacious 5-inch display.
The good news: Like most printers (especially business-oriented models), the 179fnw supplements the control panel with easier access to its configuration, monitoring (including consumables), report generating, viewing, and printing features via a built-in web server, shown here.
The 179fnw's paper handling and input capacity, which (like on its LaserJet Pro M180nw sibling) consists of one 150-sheet cassette and a 50-sheet output tray (100 sheets on the M180nw), doesn't get much more entry-level.
Canon's MF634Cdw provides increased versatility by including a 1-sheet override tray for printing one-off envelopes and other media that might require emptying the main cassette and reconfiguring it.
Meanwhile, the Brother MFC-L3770CDW's 250-sheet main drawer and 30-sheet override tray hold almost twice as much paper as these other models.
HP rates the 179fnw's maximum monthly duty cycle at 20,000 pages, with a meager recommended monthly print volume of 100 to 500 pages.
Both the M180nw's and the MFC-L3770CDW's duty cycles are 10,000 pages higher.
But HP and Brother rate the recommended print volumes, the more pertinent and informative of these two specs, at 1,500 pages.
The MF634Cdw, with an 18,000-pages-higher duty cycle and recommended volume five times that of the 179fnw, is the most robust of this bunch.
Connections, Security, and Productivity Software
The 179fnw's out-of-the-box connectivity interfaces are Ethernet 10/100Based-Tx, connection to a single PC with USB 2.0, dual-band Wi-Fi, and Wi-Fi Direct.
Wi-Fi Direct is a peer-to-peer network protocol that allows you to connect your tablet or smartphone directly to the printer without either them or it being connected to a local network.
You also get additional functionality via HP's Smart App.
In addition to providing a similar interface across all platforms, the HP Smart App provides enhanced mobile support with features like scanning to the printer with your smartphone and setting up workflow profiles for repetitive tasks such as scanning to the cloud and other destinations.
Other mobile features include Apple AirPrint, Google Cloud Print, and Mopria.
One of the latest trends for consumer-grade and small-business printers and AIOs these days is voice activation, or, in this case, what HP calls HP Voice-Activated Printing, with built-in support for Amazon Alexa, Google Assistant, and Microsoft Cortana.
Adding support for other voice or Smart Home services, including Apple's Siri or Samsung's Bixby and any other service that supports IFTTT (if this, then that) scripting, is straightforward.
You can find instructions, as well as several useful scripts, at IFTTT.com.
Security on the 179fnw consists primarily of the ability to password protect the embedded Web server mentioned earlier and to disable network ports to block unwanted traffic.
And, of course, you can filter IP and MAC addresses.
But missing are features like Secure Print for protecting documents with PINs and Department IDs for restricting access to specific functions and to the printer itself via usernames and passwords.
In addition to the standard printer and scanner drivers, HP includes its HP MFP Scan, HP LJ Network PC-Fax, and an optical character recognition (OCR) utility for converting scanned images of text to editable text.
Entry-Level Performance
HP rates the 179fnw at 19 pages per minute (ppm) for monochrome pages and 4ppm for color pages.
The monochrome page rating is on the low end of average for entry-level laser printers, but the 4ppm color page rating is one of the lowest I've seen.
To assess how well the 179fnw performs compared with other entry-level color printers, I tested it over an Ethernet connection from our standard Intel Core i5 PC running Windows 10 Professional.
See How We Test Printers
The 179fnw churned our 12-page Microsoft Word text document at an average rate of 18.9ppm, essentially matching HP's rating.
The 179fnw's M180nw sibling came in at 3.5ppm slower, while Canon's MF634Cdw managed 7.9ppm faster.
Brother's MFC-L3770CDW matched the 179fnw's score, and the Editors' Choice Epson WorkForce Pro WF-C5790, a midrange inkjet laser alternative, printed the same 12 pages at an average rate of 24.4ppm.
The next phase in our benchmarking regimen entailed printing several color Adobe Acrobat documents, Excel spreadsheets and accompanying charts and graphs, and PowerPoint handouts comprised of a mixture of complex business graphics and text in various colors, typefaces, and point sizes.
Then, I combined the results from these tests with those from printing the 12-page text document in the previous test and came up with a score of 5.3ppm for churning out our 26-page suite of test documents.
That score, though it beats HP's color page rating by 1.3ppm, is by far the lowest I've seen for a laser printer.
Even HP's M180nw sibling managed to churn out our test documents 4.7ppm faster, and Canon's MF634Cdw beat the 179fnw by 5.3ppm.
Brother's MFC-L3770CDW came in 5ppm ahead of today's HP test unit, and the WF-C5790 score of 17.7ppm trounced all the laser machines mentioned here.
While laser printers are not the machines of choice for printing photos, I clocked the 179fnw as it printed our vibrantly colorful and highly detailed 4-by-6-inch snapshots.
It turned in an average time of 27 seconds per image, which is several seconds slower than the other AIOs mentioned here, but still better than acceptable.
Mixed Output Quality
The 179fnw's output quality on most of our test documents was good, but it did struggle with some of the more complex full-page Excel charts and PowerPoint handouts containing dark and gradient backgrounds.
Especially notable is the banding in a dark green to black gradient background that several of the printers we've tested over the years have had trouble with, and I also saw some banding in a dark-blue background on a PowerPoint handout.
Surprisingly, though, the documents containing solid black backgrounds came out without any notable toner distribution issues.
These output flaws were not rampant among our test documents, but instead intermittent, though consistent on each copy of the same page I printed.
Text, on the other hand, came out looking above average, with well-shaped characters and highly legible fonts down to 4 points, the smallest point size we test.
Photos were accurately colored and vibrant, while the detail was above average for a laser printer, and therefore appropriate for most business applications.
Expensive to Use
Entry-level laser printers, especially compared with some of their inkjet competitors, are relatively expensive to use.
The 179fnw has, at 6.2 cents per monochrome page and 29 cents per color page, some of the highest running expenses I've seen recently and costs about twice as much to use as most other entry-level color laser printers.
Canon's MF634Cdw, for example, delivers running costs of 3.2 cents for black pages and 16.4 cents per color print.
Brother's MFC-L3770CDW monochrome cost per page is, at 2.6 cents, lower still, as is its color per-page cost of 15.5-cents.
The Epson WF-C5790, even though it lists for the same price as the 179fnw, prints monochrome pages for as low as 1.7 cents and color pages for about 7.7 cents.
If you're printing and copying several hundred to a few thousand pages each month, especially color pages, these cost-per-page numbers can mean the difference between several hundred and a few thousand dollars over the life of the printer.
The more you print, the more critical it is to choose a printer with reasonable per-page costs.
With that said, HP's 100 to 500 page suggested monthly volume does indicate that the 179fnw is designed for low-volume environments.
However, given the per-page cost of toner for this machine, printing more than 100 pages or so each month is an expensive proposition.
The more your estimated print volume exceeds that number, the more you should probably consider one of the other models mentioned here.
Best for Low-Volume Printing
The 179fnw is a relatively inexpensive color laser AIO designed for low-volume output in home-based and micro offices where space is at a premium.
Even so, for the $100-list-price difference between it and its much beefier and feature-rich competitors, you give up a lot, such as an auto-duplexing ADF and print engine and much lower running costs, as well as banding-free print quality with certain types of business graphics.
If these features are essential to you, consider the Editors' Choice Canon MF634Cdw or Brother MFC-L3770CDW.
If, however, all you or your small work team need is to print or copy 100 pages or so each month, this small color laser AIO might be a good fit.
HP Color Laser MFP 179fnw
Cons
Lacks automatic two-sided printing, copying, and scanning.
Low recommended volume rating.
High running costs.
The Bottom Line
The HP Color Laser MFP 179fnw is a simple entry-level color laser AIO with performance and features that are best suited for printing or copying in low-volume offices.
