HardwareCentral - HP Color LaserJet 2600N Review.

HP Color LaserJet 2600N Review

Nice Pages, No Waiting

July 19, 2005
By Eric Grevstad

Nice Pages, No Waiting

HP says the cartridges offer "Smart Printing" technology, meaning each cartridge contains a development system and imaging drum as well as toner, so there are no other parts to replace (although we can't help wondering if the unit might need a tuneup or at least a new transfer belt after 50,000 or 100,000 pages).

Similarly, HP brags that "Memory Enhancement" technology manipulates the printer's 16MB of RAM so that no memory upgrade is ever needed. Since we recently tested a Konica Minolta 2430DL that needed a not-inconsiderable 256MB upgrade to produce full-page, high-resolution images, we were skeptical, or at least suspicious that the Color LaserJet 2600N would steal a hefty amount of our PC's memory and/or processing power. But we had no trouble printing full-page images, and applications' "Now Printing" dialog boxes disappeared swiftly instead of causing a noticeable wait to regain control of the system. Credit the HP's onboard 264MHz Motorola processor.

The 2600N has a 600 by 600 dpi print engine, but HP's ImageREt 2400 system fine-tunes dot placement to simulate higher resolution. Both photo images and solid color areas were indeed somewhat cleaner when we accepted the ImageREt default rather than telling the software driver to stick to 600 dpi quality.

The driver offers a good variety of N-up, scale-to-fit, and watermark options as well as guiding you through manual duplex or double-sided printing. A set of buttons and a two-line LCD provide manual default-setting and job-canceling controls, but we found the LCD too dim to read easily so stuck with the driver and HP's browser-based status and configuration menus.

A loading slot at the bottom front lets you feed envelopes, special stock, or letterhead for print-first-page-on-different-paper jobs; above it, a pull-out 250-sheet drawer serves as the primary paper supply for pages that exit face down in a 125-sheet output bin at the top. A 250-sheet second drawer is $150, but there's no duplexing option.

Easy Reading

The 2600N comes close to meeting HP's claim of a first-page-out printing time of 20 seconds; our one-page letter with spot-color company logo took 22 seconds (or 24 after letting the printer sit idle for a few hours to shift from its 190-watt working to 13-watt standby mode). That ties or narrowly beats most of the affordable color lasers we've tested -- and the HP is quieter than most, too, if you'd like to put it near your desk phone instead of down the hall.

With longer color jobs, the single-pass 2600N easily outran its four-pass peers: Six full-page PowerPoint slides with white backgrounds took 67 seconds, while six PowerPoints with dark backgrounds took 73 (versus, for example, 200 for the Konica Minolta 2300W and 345 for the Color LaserJet 2550L in earlier reviews). The HP printed our 55-page Adobe Acrobat manual in 6 minutes and 48 seconds, one of the fastest times we've recorded.

As mentioned, however, a single-pass design can't keep up with four-pass or even $120 monochrome lasers when printing in black and white: The HP took 2 minutes and 37 seconds to print our 20-page text document in Microsoft Word, double or almost triple the time of assorted competitors.

We were also disappointed with the 2600N's output when printing photos on plain paper; 8 by 10-inch images averaged 42 seconds, but looked darker and grainier than we'd like. But with that exception, the HP's quality earned a thumbs-up: Even tiny text fonts were sharp and legible, while PDF and presentation files and flyers and newsletters with small photos were bright and crisp.

Color laser printers are still priced and positioned more for workgroups than for individual desktop users, but that's changing fast. The Color LaserJet 2600N makes a lot of sense for almost any small office; we'd call it the most desktop-friendly color laser to date.