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Affordable Color Printer For The Home & Small Office
{mosgoogle}If you're in the market for a low cost full color laser printer then you'll want to take a good long look at the Color LaserJet 2550L from Hewlett Packard. The HP 2550L is part of a new breed of low cost color laser printers that is making it easier to move up from inkjet printers.
One of the advantages of using a color laser printer over an inkjet is the HP 2550L color laser printer can created really high quality images on plain white paper. An inkjet printer requires special paper that can cost over $1 a sheet. Even though the 2550L resolution of 600 x 600 which is lower than most inkjets or HP's higher end color laser printers the quality is still excellent thanks to the HP ImageREt 2400 technology print engine.
The HP Color LaserJet 2550L is ideally suited for home office and small office use. At 18.98" x 17.8" x 12.8" the 2550L is extremely compact for a full color laser. Print speed is 20 page per minute for black and 4 page per minute for color. Monthly print volume is recommended at 30,000. This should be more than enough for most home and small office users.
Where To Buy It
Price wise, the HP Color LaserJet 2550L looks like a bargain. At the time of this review the printer sell for $240.00 to $470.00. However this low price point was achieved with a few sacrifices. For one, the only connection available is through the parallel or USB port - there is no built-in networking. To share the HP 2550L will require you to go through Windows or buy an external printer server. However, at the price the Color LaserJet 2550L sells for, we're not complaining.
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Installation & Setup
{mosgoogle}Setting up the HP Color LaserJet 2550L was pretty straight forward but does take some time because of the number of parts that needs to be installed. HP provides a really nice user guide that is very easy to follow. The four colored toner cartridges are individually packed in plastic and are protected from damage with orange removable plastic covers. The toner cartridge is sealed by a plastic strip that you simply pull out before you load each of the cartridges into the printer.
After installing the toner you will also need to install the imaging drum. The actual loading of the toner cartridges and imaging drum unit is very easy to perform - just plug in the printer and push the power button. Once the unit is powered up you just simply open the top cover and slide the imaging drum into it corresponding slot. After that you start loading the toner cartridges into their proper location based on the color of each toner that is in the cartridge. The printer tells you which color goes in which slot with four colored dots coinciding with the color of the toners. After installing a toner cartridge the toner carousel will rotate to allow the loading of the next color.
Installing the toner cartridges and imaging drum takes the longest time. By comparison, attaching the printer to the computer and installing the software is a cakewalk. You only have two options to hook the HP 2550L to your computer - LPT1 printer port or USB port. Like all printers today, HP doesn't include any printer or USB cable with their 2550L, so make sure you pick one up with the printer.
Where To Buy It
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The Printer Cartridge Shell Game
{mosgoogle}The HP Color LaserJet 2550L was connected to our test computer with a 12 foot long USB cable. Using the long cable allowed us to install the printer inside the closet. While the 2550L is small for a laser printer, it's still a fairly large for a desktop printer and takes up way more space than most color bubble jet printer. The 2550L has no LCD display to let you know the status of the printer so you must depend on indicator lights to tell you what's going on. There is a blue light to tell you that the printer is online and ready to go. There's also 4 indicator lights with a corresponding color code on the printer for each of the four color toners.
The toner black cartridge is rated at 5000 pages (based on 5% coverage) and the color cartridges are rated at 2000 pages (again based on 5% coverage). The toner cartridges have a smart chip built into them that allows the printer to track number of pages printed. These cartridges cost up to $80 so you're looking at $320 to change all the toner. The 2550L also verify that you are using genuine HP cartridges so you can't go buy cheaper replacement toner. You can buy HP replacement color toner capable of generating 4000 pages for $100 to reduce the per page cost. A replacement imaging drum cost $175, which HP says will last for 20,000 black pages or 5000 color pages.
From a consumables standpoint, the HP Color LaserJet 2550L is an expensive printer to run. This seems to be the way printers are marketed and sold today - sell you the hardware cheap, then screw you on the consumables. At $175 for an imaging drum and $320 to $400 for toner, you might as well buy a brand new LaserJet!
Now before you go saying this printer is a complete rip off, you should know that its operating cost on a per print basis is in fact cheaper than many inkjet printers. On a per print basis inkjet toner cost more than laser toner and because inkjet require special paper to get the best result, printing cost can run well over $2 a page. When you compare that to the 25 cents per page it cost to run the LaserJet, it doesn't seem so bad.
Where To Buy It
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Printing Quality & Conclusion
{mosgoogle}The 2550L has a fairly long spool up cycle. When making a test print, it took about 30 seconds to rev up and about 4 seconds to print. On multi-page jobs, it took up to a minute to cycle through its toner and imaging system before it started printing. But once it's printing, the unit is quite quick. The printer is quite noisy when printing - which was one of the reason why we installed it in the closet. The long spool up time pretty much kills the rated printer speed of 20 page per minute for black and 4 page per minute for color. Once we added in the spooling up to the calculation, print speed slowed to a leisurely 9 page per minute for black and about 1.5 page per minute for color.
The HP Color LaserJet 2550L did offer superb print quality however. Even the smallest fonts in our test prints were quite readable and clear. The printer also did a fantastic job printing line-art. There was no visible banding what-so-ever and all the lines stayed distinct. Color prints were a bit dark when using plain paper, but the image was sharp. The image brightens right up when we switched to higher quality laser paper and sharpness increased another notch.
The 2550L works with a wide range for printing media - from plain paper, to envelopes, to card stock. Not once during our print testing did the printer ever jam. The paper tray holds 125 sheets and output prints at the top of the printer. You will need to use the straight-through bypass to print card stock, and then only one print at a time.
The cost of the HP 2550L seems substantial until you break it down. According to our price index this printer sells for $240.00 to $470.00. That's really low for a color laser printer and isn't that much more expensive than a high quality inkjet printer. Also the operating cost of the 2550L is a substantially less than that of an inkjet. Add in the higher quality offer by laser printing and we don't see why you're next printer shouldn't be personal laser printer like the HP Color LaserJet 2550L.
Where To Buy It
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