Not for old women who live in shoes (HP Color Laserjet 2600n)

Member Name: hillcrestsan

Product:	HP Color Laserjet 2600n
Date:	05/01/08 (128 review reads)
Rating:

Advantages: Looks good, prints well

Disadvantages: not for bulk printing

This is another piece of kit from work that weve been using now for about 8 months. The poor thing has been dumped in the computer suite as a workhorse for the hoards of print happy kids who pass through it all day. Alas, it has failed the task - through no real fault of its own.
We have another one sat in the heads office that has had one change of the black cartridge in the same amount of time as weve had the other one. The kids one had been through about 7 changes of all cartridges and weve had enough - off the to the staff computers it has gone, to plod away with gentler demand. We cant afford to keep it for the kids anymore. Not until they realise that a webpage might actually take 12 pages to print out and that you only need to press print once and apply something known as patience. Unfortunately, children do this;

print
Wheres my printout?
print
Wheres my printout?
print
Wheres my printout?
print
Wheres my printout?
print
Wheres my printout?
They carry on doing this until it comes out and then toddle off to leave the other 20 copies to pile up on the tray.

Print quality
----------------
And its a shame - this printed really nicely.
The black was very black and the colours were bright and lively - remarkably different from the inkjets we were using. The text was very clear at 600x600 dpi, no matter how close you get to it. To be honest - a bit too good for the kids!

It handles most media well though weve not used an extensive range beyond paper (recycled) and photo paper. The blurb will tell you it takes:
Envelopes, transparencies, labels, plain paper, glossy paper, glossy photo paper, cards, matt photo paper, bond paper, recycled paper.
Nothing special but will do most things youll need.
The printer will churn out the goods at a fair old whack. All that rubbish the kids print flies out compared to the poor old geriatric canon inkjet. HP quote about 8ppm and that seems about right. Not the fastest of lasers I know but were not doing runs of 20,000 books so it suits us fine.

Set up and install
------------------------
Came in a really big box. Looks like itd take 2 printers but disappointingly there was only one.Usual plug-and-play set-up on a workstation via a usb (supplied). we got the technician to install it to the network at a later date as that flies above my level slightly. All-in-all it seemed easy and we had no problems getting any of the stations to print and weve had no further complications.
I have noticed that the printer had a long warm-up time on the network which is partly what hastened the kids with their rapid fire impatience with the print button.
Supplies
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About £40 per HP cartridde which was getting WAY too expensive for the kids to use. I think the compatibles were coming in at around £30.

* 1 x toner cartridge ( cyan ) - up to 2000 pages
* 1 x toner cartridge ( magenta ) - up to 2000 pages
* 1 x toner cartridge ( yellow ) - up to 2000 pages
* 1 x toner cartridge ( black ) - up to 2500 pages
Looks
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Chunky but not especially bulky if that makes any sense. The footprint is about 40x40cm and it sat snugly in a corner of the suite, to quite a height on the bench (again, about 40cm). Lets just say that it had a definite presence without being domineering. Sort of like my wife. If I lie a lot. Its grey and streamlined and I suppose it has a bit of style. For a printer. If you care, then youre weird.
The above is what HP says. Not what I'd say! If we were ever doing more than 1500 pages before a cartridge went AWOL then Id be amazed. Mind you - I haven't counted. That would be sad.

Techy bits
--------------
The printer sports 16MB onboard RAM and a Motorola ColdFire 4e 264 MHz processor. This means bugger-all-on-a-stick to me. It doesn't seem to make it work any faster though anyway. Thats enough techy stuff. Its dull. Go look on the website if you need to know more than that you lazy so-and-so's.
Overall
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Yeah I like it and Id buy another one for school if we needed another laser anywhere. There are better but it all comes down to hair-splitting stuff doesnt it. How fast do you need? How clear do you want the print? I really can't imagine how you could need more than it gives you but hey - everyones different.
Definately dont buy this though if you have 25 kids wanting to print webpages!

Happy new year to all!

Originally posted by myself (dhillcrest) on ciao.

Summary: Good quality for our purposes

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