HardwareCentral - HP Color LaserJet 3500 Review

HP Color LaserJet 3500 Review

Is That a Refrigerator in Your Office?

March 16, 2004
By Eric Grevstad

Is That a Refrigerator in Your Office?

Like other color lasers, the 3500 is too enormous to share your desk with your monitor and keyboard: It has a 19 by 18-inch footprint and stands 18.5 inches tall, and tips the scales at a you-might-want-to-get-a-coworker-to-help-set-it-up 72 pounds. It's also relatively noisy -- not quite matching the whirs, clunks, and thunks of its Color LaserJet 1500/2500 cousins, but distracting if right next to your desk or phone.

Despite its bulk, the HP is an attractive unit, with an exceptionally easy-to-read LCD control-panel menu at top left and a positively stylish stylish round rocker switch by way an on/off button at the bottom left. Unless you need to specify a custom paper type (which the LCD helpfully gave us a few seconds' opportunity to do after we loaded what it correctly identified as plain letter stock), you'll probably rarely use the front-panel controls apart from printing supplies-status or configuration pages, but they're no trouble to navigate.

While a few economy models make do with inkjet-style plastic trays, the 3500 passes our test with a genuine, photocopier-style 250-sheet paper drawer at the bottom, suited for legal as well as letter and other sizes. A second, 500-sheet, letter-or-A4-only tray that fits beneath is a $300 option.

Envelopes and special stock can take advantage of a tray that folds down from the front, with a straight-path exit tray that folds down from the back. Regular jobs exit to a face-down bin atop the printer, with the usual 150-sheet-but-we'd-call-it-100-tops capacity.

Cranking It Out

The HP's monthly duty cycle is a robust 45,000 pages, which (as with all printers) would entail some pretty robust costs if you actually met it: The unit's black toner cartridge (replacements are $133) is rated for 6,000 pages, with the cyan, magenta, and yellow cartridges ($130 each) rated for 4,000. To HP's credit, the toners supplied with the printer are the real deal, not the half-empty starter cartridges of some competitors.

After 60,000 pages, you'll need to replace an $80 image transfer kit and $70 fuser kit. Those prices make the Color LaserJet 3500 hardly cheap, but somewhat more economical over the long haul than many printers we've checked out lately; our unofficial calculator suggests a cost per page (not counting paper) of 2.5 cents for black and an even 10 cents for color.

After removing a few dozen bits of tape and plastic and opening the massive, fold-down front door, you'll find the image transfer unit already installed, so setup is a painless chore of inserting the four toner cartridges into slots, one atop the other. HP says the printer takes a maximum of 350 watts, with quick recovery from power-save mode, though as usual we couldn't match its advertised 22-second first-page out time: Our one-page Word letter, mixing a couple of paragraphs of text with a letterhead with color company logo, took 27 seconds (one second under the former in-house record held by the Samsung CLP-500).

We've already mentioned the 3500's somewhat unimpressive speed for black text jobs and quite impressive speed with our 55-page Acrobat file. Most other performance results averaged straight down the middle -- a pleasing 1 minute and 53 seconds for six full-page PowerPoint slides with blank white backgrounds, a less pleasing 3 minutes and 19 seconds for the same number of slides with solid, dark backgrounds.

But though we know it's a business printer, we'll give a shout out to the 600 by 600-dpi LaserJet's clarity -- what HP calls ImageREt 2400 -- with our 8 by 10-inch digital-camera images, which appeared in an average 63 seconds apiece and looked, to give the highest compliment possible for an $800 color laser, almost as nice as prints from a $100 color inkjet (albeit, of course, on plain copier paper instead of glossy photo stock).

All told, the Color LaserJet 3500 is a fascinating addition to the blossoming crop of under-$1,000, business-class color printers: You'll find plenty of cheap, compact lasers that easily best its monochrome performance, but it delivers truly great-looking pages at a noticeably faster pace than its four-pass color-laser rivals. If your business calls for colorful handouts or reports, it's a winner.

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