High quality colour just got faster! (HP Color Laserjet 2500)

Member Name: richard_richard

Product:	HP Color Laserjet 2500
Date:	17/04/04 (320 review reads)
Rating:

Advantages: High quality colour printing, Fast response

Disadvantages: Cost of consumables

The Hewlett Packard Laserjet 2500n is a colour laserjet printer designed for small and medium sized office applications.

After the problems we have had at my office with the slow printing speed of our HP Laserjet 4500, the decision was taken to back up this printer with a second colour laser printer, albeit a slightly cheaper model.

After some research we decided that the HP 2500n model would be the best to go for. We wanted to stick with Hewlett Packard as all the other printers in the office are from this manufacturer and we have always been impressed with their quality and reliability.

This printer will retail for around £700-£750, depending on which supplier you use.


Specifications
The HP Laserjet 2500n has a decent list of specifications. Printing speed is 4 pages per minute colour and 16 pages per minute black and white. The printer comes with a good sized memory, 64MB. The printing resolution is 600x600 dots per inch, and this includes HP?s ?Imageret 2400? technology to make images look as sharp as possible.

Other features of the printer include, built in parallel and USB ports, 2 paper trays and compatibility with Windows 95, 98, ME, NT4, 2000 and XP.


In Use
The printer itself is a modern looking unit, being finished in white and blue. The dimensions are a fairly compact, 428mm width by 451mm depth by 376mm height. It has to be said that the printer is quite heavy, weighing in at a hefty 23.9kg. It does feel slightly lighter than our Laserjet 4500 though, that one is definitely a two person job to lift!

The printer was quite easy to set up onto our network, being connected from the parallel port, to a jet direct box. A CD is provided that gives you a set of printer drivers which can be loaded onto a stand alone computer, or to a network server, as in our case.

Once the printer was set up it was time to give it a test run to see how it performed. I selected some photos
that were taken with a digital camera and saved onto our network as the test for how well it performed printing colour. As with all colour laser printers there will always be a slight delay before printing, as these are quite complicated beasts with many moving parts to synchronise. I do feel that this printer warms itself up slightly quicker than our Laserjet 4500, which can only be a good thing as we have had a number of complaints from staff about how long that printer took to start printing!

Once the printer had warmed up and started printing the response rate to print requests was good, this probably being down to the onboard 64MB memory supplied with this printer.

The print quality on the colour photos I had requested to be printed was impressive. The images were clear, crisp and had good colour definition. I had been printing on normal photocopier paper and so I imagine these images would look even better on glossy or photo paper.

I felt the colour print quality was slightly better than our 4500 printer, and this I imagine could be down to the ?Imageret 2400? technology that this printer is equipped with. Although 600x600 dpi does not sound that impressive by today?s inkjet standards, for a colour laserjet it is still pretty much the industry standard and gives good quality output.

Testing the black and white printing using a couple of Word documents, I found that the page rate and response time were both very good. Print quality was sharp and clear and up to the standard you would expect from a standard black and white laser printer.

This printer has a second paper tray built in which is a handy feature as it allows you to have an extra 250 sheets of paper available on top of the usual 100 sheets in the first paper tray.

In terms of reliability, this printer is far too new to comment on how it will perform, but we have chosen Hewlett Packard in the past for their quality so I can?t imagine we will have
too many problems with this printer.

Well so far so good, but now onto my gripes. Well ok there is only one and if you?ve read any of my other Hewlett Packard reviews then this is going to sound very familiar! Yes it?s the old chestnut that is the high cost of consumables! The HP 2500n takes 4 toner cartridges, black, yellow, cyan and magenta and each one of these will cost you around £80. So you are talking about paying out around £320 just to replace a set of toners! This I feel is just too expensive, especially after you have already laid out nearly £800 for the printer in the first place!


Conclusion
This is a good quality colour laserjet printer. The output is clear and crisp and the printer response times are good, a definite improvement over the 4500 model. I would recommend this printer to people working in a small to medium sized office environment who want good quality colour printing.

As ever you have the caveat attached to all of this which is cost of Hewlett Packard?s replacement consumables, so be warned!

Thanks for reading!

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