Small office / Home office
HP's color-laser printer offers divine indulgence

By Simson L. Garfinkel
Special to The Seattle Times

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For the past few years, small businesses and home-computer users have had a choice when it came to printers: They could have the sharp quality of a laser printer costing around $500 or they could pay half that and get an inkjet that printed with bold, vibrant colors.

But as printer prices continue to plummet, the crème de la crème of business printers — the color laser — is now within the reach of many.

Color laser printers are almost magical creations. Web pages printed on color laser look like they came from a professional print shop. Photos don't have the realism of an inkjet printer working on glossy paper, but they are still very pleasing to look at.

Hewlett-Packard's entry into the affordable color-laser market is the LaserJet 2500L, a large desktop printer that delivers 16 black-and-white pages per minute, four color pages (600-by-600 dots per inch) per minute, and all at an eye-popping price of $999.99.

That price gets you a printer with a 125-sheet paper tray, 64MB of RAM (enough for the most complicated pages), and built-in Postscript 3 emulation, making this printer attractive to Windows, Macintosh and Unix users.

For $200 more, the LaserJet 2500 model has a second 250-sheet tray, and for $1,899.99, you get the top-of-the-line LaserJet 2500tn, which comes with the 250-sheet tray, the 500-sheet tray and a built-in Ethernet interface.

The LJ2500 uses a new kind of "smart" print cartridge made specifically for this printer. All cartridges are rated at 5,000 pages, assuming a 5 percent print coverage per page. The black cartridge costs $82.99, while the cyan, magenta and yellow cartridges are $99.99 each.

There is also a color-imaging drum ($173.99) that needs to be replaced every 5,000 pages. Considering you can get 5,000 sheets of paper for about $20 at an office superstore, estimated printing costs are 2 cents per page for black and white, and 14 cents per page for color.

These numbers, of course, depend on what you are printing. If your use of color is for printing color logos at the top of your letterhead, your cartridges will last considerably longer. If you are mostly printing full-page photographs, you'll have between 18 percent and 25 percent color-toner coverage on average — about 40 cents per page.

Fortunately, you don't need to do that math yourself. The 2500's cartridges work closely with the printer's fancy monitoring system and tell you how many pages each cartridge has printed, the percentage of toner left and the estimated number of pages you can print. The program also gives you a button you can click to order more supplies.

I had no problem getting the printer to work with my Windows XP system. Integration with Windows is superb.

The Mac was another story: The installer didn't work for the network-based printer, but I was able to manually add it using Apple's Print Center utility. Once added, all my Mac could do was print, although I could connect to the printer's built-in JetDirect server with my Mac's Web browser to access the printer's special features.

The print quality of this machine is spectacular. The printer is also remarkably fast. From its power-saving "standby" mode, I was able to print a black-and-white page in less than 80 seconds.

My one disappointment with this machine was with glossy photographic paper: The heat from the xerographic process damaged the uniformity of the glossy sheen.

For a small business that's making brochures, marketing material or color letterhead, this low-cost color laser is almost certainly a better choice than sending work to the local print shop. For a home user, the 2500 is an affordable indulgence.

Simson L. Garfinkel is a free-lance tech writer based in New England.

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