HP Color LaserJet 2600N Review

Bad News for Inkjet Vendors

How can you tell when a technology or product category has really hit the mainstream or evolved from the geek elite to a mass-market consumer item? You've seen it happen with external hard drives, inkjet printers, and monochrome laser printers, and it's always the same: First the products get affordable. Then they get small. Then they get cute. Ladies and gentlemen, color laser printers have reached Stage III.

To be sure, the HP Color LaserJet 2600N isn't as compact as today's toaster-sized monochrome personal lasers -- although at 16 by 18 by 15 inches, it can fit on all but the smallest desks instead of requiring a separate stand. The 2600N also weighs 41 pounds, making it much easier to move than many 70- or 75-pound color lasers.

Nor does it match mini monochrome models' $100 to $150 price tags, although it's way, way under the $1,000 line that was once a color laser landmark: With an Ethernet as well as a USB port and a real paper drawer instead of some models' flapping, inkjet-style trays, the HP costs $399. That's the same as Konica Minolta's USB-only Magicolor 2400W, although some retailers discount the step-up Magicolor 2430DL or Samsung's CLP-510 to under $400. (And others discount the Color LaserJet 2600N; HP's site posts a limited-time price of $360 and Staples an ends-July-23 offer of $340 -- Ed.)

What makes the 2600N stand out from such competitors is that it doesn't use a four-pass color engine (capable of printing, say, 20 pages per minute for black text but slowing to 5 ppm when layering black, cyan, magenta, and yellow for color jobs). Instead, it's a single-pass design, rated at 8 ppm for monochrome and color alike. That means it'll outrun its rivals when printing PowerPoint slides, advertising flyers, or newsletters, but isn't the fastest choice for lengthy black-and-white documents.

Finally, it strikes us as kind of cute, with a family resemblance to last spring's single-pass Color LaserJet 3500 but more of an Ikea-home-appliance (breadbox? mini dishwasher?) look as well as weighing 45 percent less.

An Inkjet Alternative?

Of course, while $399 is cheap for a color laser printer, it's three or four times the cost of a good inkjet printer -- which can almost match the speed and print quality of the 2600N and indeed surpass its quality when printing photos on glossy paper.

But buying the inkjet's preferred coated paper (instead of cheap plain paper) and replacing its short-lived ink cartridges (instead of higher-capacity laser toner cartridges) will quickly turn any savings to extra expenditures -- even before you consider the Color LaserJet's superior stamina for a busy office, with a rated duty cycle of 35,000 pages per month.

Speaking of toner cartridges, while it doesn't put a USB cable in the box, HP earns our applause by outfitting the 2600N with full-capacity instead of half- or two-thirds-empty "starter" cartridges as penny-pinching competitors do. A replacement black cartridge is rated for 2,500 pages and costs $75; the cyan, magenta, and yellow cartridges are rated for 2,000 pages and $83 apiece.

We figure that as a consumables cost (not counting paper) of 3 cents per black and 15.5 cents per color page -- middling rather than excellent economy by laser standards, but super-frugal compared to most inkjets.

When you take the 2600N out of the box, the four toner cartridges are already stacked inside the printer, but you must remove, pull out a strip of sealing tape, and reinsert each one, along with removing various other pieces of tape and plastic and affixing plastic pieces to the paper tray and output catch tray. Inserting the cartridges properly took a few seconds' trial and error, but was hardly a traumatic experience, though one bit of shipping material tore leaving a stub still in the printer, causing error messages until we removed the magenta cartridge and found the snag.

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