HP Color LaserJet 3500 Review
One Single-Pass SensationMarch 16, 2004
By Eric Grevstad
One Single-Pass Sensation
OK, a color laser printer priced within reach of small offices, workgroups, or even individuals with $800 to spend is no longer new or startling. But how about one that prints faster in color than in monochrome? Cue Bill Murray in Ghostbusters: "Volcanoes, human sacrifice, dogs and cats living together, mass hysteria!"
All right, Bill might be exaggerating a little, but HP's new Color LaserJet 3500 is still noteworthy. Under-$1,000 color lasers to date have used multi-pass or rotary laser printing technology, which sends each color page on four trips through the printer to apply black, cyan, magenta, and yellow toner -- the reason, for example, HP's Color LaserJet 2500 and stripped-down 1500 models, or Konica Minolta's Magicolor 2300W, are rated at 16 pages per minute in black and 4 ppm in color.
But the Color LaserJet 3500, like corporate-office models that cost far more than its $800, uses single-pass or tandem technology that yields a rated speed of 12 ppm for color and monochrome pages alike. That leaves it, somewhat surprisingly, at a disadvantage to even desktop personal lasers that cost one-quarter as much, as well as to the abovementioned rivals, for cranking out high-volume, plain-vanilla text jobs: Connected to the same PC, it took the new HP twice as long as the Magicolor 2300W to print our 20-page monochrome Microsoft Word test document (3 minutes and 10 seconds).
For colorful charts, presentations, and reports, however, the shoe is on the other foot, and the foot kicks other low-priced color lasers' butts: Our 55-page Adobe Acrobat manual, which took the Magicolor 16 minutes and the Samsung CLP-500 about 13, was finished in 9 minutes and 39 seconds. It also looked gorgeous, with fine details, sharp text, and virtually no banding in solid-color areas.
If you need hundreds of pages of black text in a hurry, the Color LaserJet 3500 is not for you. (In fact, checking the "print in grayscale" box in the software driver, while it saves color toner, actually slowed the printer in our tests, adding almost 6 minutes to the 55-page PDF job.) But if you want a workhorse printer for color flyers, proposals, or newsletters, HP can make you an offer of biblical proportions.
Share Or Be Selfish
Like its competitors, the HP is available in an assortment of solo and networked configurations. The $800 Color LaserJet 3500 tested here has 64MB of memory (not expandable) and a USB 2.0 interface, while the $1,000 model 3500n comes with an HP JetDirect external Ethernet print server that plugs into the USB port. (The server's separate power supply requires a second AC outlet.)
The $1,300 Color LaserJet 3700 and $1,600 model 3700n feature parallel and EIO as well as USB ports, plus expandable memory, a higher monthly duty cycle, and longer-lasting toner cartridges. Most important, they're faster -- 16 ppm instead of 12.
The $2,000 model 3700dn adds an automatic two-sided printing unit, though less frequent page-flippers can make do with the 3500/3700 driver's choice of manual duplexing (properly formatted for top-, left-, or right-edge binding). The driver also offers a good array of watermark, resized, and N-up printing options.
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