HP Color LaserJet 2500 Review

Four Printers in One

Like all color lasers, the 2500 sends a page through four passes or works like a team of four lasers with cyan, magenta, and yellow as well as black toner cartridges -- its rated black-text throughput of 16 pages per minute divides exactly to 4 ppm for color jobs. The latter can be beat by the fastest desktop inkjets, though the former can't (remember the shopper's motto that advertised laser print speeds are fairly accurate, but advertised inkjet speeds should usually be divided by two).

Our five-page, various-fonts Microsoft Word test document printed in 35 seconds; our one-page business letter with colorful company-logo letterhead took the same. (First-page-out delays averaged about 20 seconds for black and 25 seconds for color printing.)

Twenty pages of text took 1 minute and 33 seconds, while six pages of mixed text and color illustrations (from an Adobe Acrobat PDF document) took 2 minutes and 11 seconds; all 55 pages of the Acrobat file printed in 26 minutes. Several times, however, the printer fell silent and we thought the job was done only to realize the HP was taking 10 or 20 seconds' pause, even with its 64MB buffer, before tackling a detailed color page.

HP says the Color LaserJet's 600 by 600 dpi engine can blend colors within pixels to perform 2,400 dpi-class image printing; we're not quite so sure, since an 8 by 10-inch digital camera photo was ready in just 36 seconds but looked merely adequate, not as vivid as the best color inkjet prints (to be fair, this was still on plain copier paper; the LaserJet can't use coated or glossy photo stock). And some areas of solid color showed faint, widely spaced banding, as if from a scratch on the imaging drum; performing the printer's cleaning/maintenance routine cleared up all but the largest color areas.

But after all, the 2500 is meant for business correspondence and presentation printing, not consumer photo projects, and earns high marks in that sphere. Even tiny text was crisp and legible, as you'd expect from a laser. Banner headlines were smooth and black, not jagged and gray, and charts and images popped off the page. For mostly-black office printing with a dash of spot color or spreadsheet charts, the Color LaserJet is a capable choice.

Reasonably Simple Setup; Reasonably Low Costs

Setting up the printer, from beginning to open the box to finishing the software installation and making our first prints, took just under an hour with our Windows 2000 desktop and USB cable (alas, you can't cheat and connect two PCs to the non-network version using both the parallel and USB ports).

The hardest part of setup is removing all the strips of tape and orange plastic spacers that secure the packaged printer and cartridges. The HP's imaging drum (including the transfer belt that's a separate component in some designs) resembles a jumbo-sized, well, laser or copier toner cartridge that slots easily into place beneath the printer's swing-up top panel.

Just above it, you lower the black, cyan, yellow, and magenta cartridges into position -- one at a time, reclosing the lid and pressing a "rotate carousel" button on the top between inserting each (think of a high-tech cowboy loading a revolver). It's simple enough, as are HP's browser-based status and diagnostic menus, though we might have welcomed an LCD menu to provide clearer prompts than the five status lights (for each cartridge and the drum) and carousel, cancel-print-job, and "go" buttons atop the printer.

HP says the drum will last for an average of around 7,000 pages (5,000 if you print entirely in color, 20,000 entirely in black); it costs $165 to replace. The black cartridge ($79) is rated for 5,000 pages, with the three color cartridges ($95 each) rated for 4,000. This adds up to a bottom line of 2.4 cents per monochrome or 12 cents per color page -- somewhat pricey compared to larger, workhorse monochrome lasers; pretty thrifty compared to desktop inkjets.

A Score, But Not a Slam Dunk

On the minus side, HP isn't that thrifty compared to its abovementioned rival Minolta-QMS; the latter's new Magicolor 2300DL packs comparable size and speed but is priced at $799 with Ethernet as well as parallel and USB interfaces, so if you can live with a little less onboard memory and standard paper capacity you can save $400.

That famous-brand price premium, plus the whirs, whines, and thunks that made the unit noticeably harder on the ears than the inkjets we've tested lately, keep this from being a rave review, and make us think the LaserJet 2500 is still more of a small-office niche player -- for, as mentioned, heavy-duty text printing coupled with a steady trickle of color charts and presentations -- than a mainstream, mass-market inkjet replacement. But color lasers' day is coming. You young whippersnappers mark our words.

Pros:

• A crisp and colorful laser printer that most offices can afford
• Easy setup and maintenance

Cons:

• Not quite compact or quiet enough for desktop placement
• A bit pricey when configured with paper trays and network port