HP Color LaserJet 2500: Good Prints at a Great Price

Ben Long

There are some basic things that most people understand about printers: inkjets deliver excellent color quality, are cheap to buy but expensive to print with; laser printers deliver so-so color quality, are expensive to buy but cheap to print with. Yet compared to inkjets they’re are fast and offer excellent text quality. Hewlett-Packard’s new Color LaserJet 2500 series of color laser printers, though, might just change your mind about some of this accepted wisdom.

These color lasers offer good color, great speed, a tidy footprint, and economical consumables. Most impressive of all, though, is the starting price of $999.

Color lasers still can’t match inkjets when it comes to photo-quality color, but for business graphics, presentations, or lengthy text-heavy documents, it’s hard to beat color laser for speed and cost per page. It’s true that for $999 you could always buy a less-expensive grayscale laser and a photo-quality inkjet, but for users who need speedy, inexpensive color output, the HP 2500 might be the ideal solution.

Bigger than a Breadbox, Shaped like a Breadmaker
Sporting an attractive 2-tone finish and a curvy design, the HP 2500 is roughly the volume of a 15-inch TV, with a shape that’s reminiscent of one of those automatic bread-making machines.

The 2500 series includes four different configurations (see Figure 1). We reviewed the base model — the $999 is the base model 2500L – which provides a 125-sheet flip-out paper feeder plus USB and parallel ports (an Ethernet port is optional).

Figure 1: The HP Color LaserJet 2500 series — including, from top, the 2500tn, 2500n, and 2500L — ranges in price from less than $1,000 to $1,900.

Next in the line-up is the 2500, which for $1,199 comes with an additional 375-sheet paper tray. The $1,499 2500n includes a built-in Ethernet print server. Finally, the $1,899 2500tn includes all of these features plus a second 500-sheet tray for a maximum 875-sheet capacity. (HP is offering rebates and other price incentives right now, so check around for the best price.)

Setup of the printer is very simple. In addition to power and computer connections, you’ll need to pop the top open to drop in the printer drum and the four toner cartridges. (Actually, the only hassle with setup was figuring out what to do with all of the plastic, tape, and wrappers that came off of the cartridges and drum.)

As with most HP gear, the 2500L feels very sturdy and is built exceptionally well (see Figure 2). Paper trays slide in and out smoothly and make for quick and easy refilling.

Figure 2: The Color laserJet 2500L, as with most HP products, is solidly built.

Each unit ships with drivers for Windows 95, 98, ME, 2000, NT 4.0, XP and Mac OS 8.6 or higher. Mac users will be pleased to find full OS X compatibility, right out of the box. The 2500 series supports HP PCL 5c and 6 as well as PostScript Level 3 emulation.

A Veritable Page Maker
HP claims 16 pages per minute (ppm) when printing monochrome and our tests show this to be very accurate. Initial processing is quick, with the first grayscale page coming out of the printer within 20-30 seconds.

Just as with a color inkjet, a color laser creates color images by combining cyan, magenta, yellow, and black, although in this case toner instead of ink. As such, when printing color, each page has to undergo four different printing passes, which is why color print speed drops from 16 ppm down to 4 ppm. Still, 4 ppm when printing out Web pages, PowerPoint presentations, and Word documents with revision tracking, is still pretty speedy.

According to HP, the drum life should come in at around 7,000 pages, assuming a mix of color and monochrome (that number climbs to 20,000 if you’re printing exclusively in black, and drops to 5,000 if you mostly print color). A replacement drum is $165.

The $79 black cartridge is rated for 5,000 pages while the color cartridges — each color costs $95 — should deliver about 4,000 pages. Assuming you do an average mix of black-and-white and color printing, you should end up spending about 2.5 cents per monochrome page, and 12 cents per color page. This is, much less expensive than the 5-10 cents per page that you would expect to pay with an inkjet. What’s more, the 2500 line produces much better results on plain paper than does an inkjet, which means you don’t have to buy expensive media.

Print Quality
The 2500 series engine has 600×600-dpi resolution that includes 45 built-in TrueType fonts and the standard set of 35 PostScript fonts.

Text output was very good, delivering razor-sharp type, even at small print sizes, whether printing monochrome or color.

We were very pleased with the 2500L’s color-image quality. Overall color was good, and surprisingly bright and contrasty with very good sharpness and detail. One of the great things about color lasers is that they produce very good quality on plain old copier paper. However, if you stick in some smooth laser paper, the 2500L’s image quality improves substantially.

Bear in mind that it doesn’t come close to photo-quality inkjet printing in terms of overall image quality and color fidelity, but these printers aren’t meant for high-quality photo printing. For the intended market of business and presentation graphics, it’s hard to complain about the 2500’s print quality, particularly when you consider price per print. For graphic artists, the 2500 series is definitely good enough for comping — and is an economical choice if you churn out lots of pages — but you won’t want to use these printers for proofing.

Some users have complained about the 2500L’s noise and quite frankly it is a bit of a rumbler. However, we didn’t find the noise to be a problem. The sounds that it does make are neither grating nor annoying, and we never felt the printer’s noise was any kind of issue. The 2500 does rattle and shake a bit while it’s printing, so you probably won’t want it sitting on your desk.

Conclusion
To be honest, I never really thought I’d be that excited about a color laser printer. Compared to the incredible output one can get from an inexpensive Epson photo printer, why hassle with color laser? However, at $1,000, this printer’s speed, color quality, sturdy build, and ease of use make it hard to maintain absolute inkjet snobbery.