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Reviews

HP-2600n Color Laser Printer

By: Bill Woelk
Date: 12/04/08

HP-2600n

Model Number: HP-2600n
Manufacturer: Hewlett Packard
Audience: SOHO Market (Small Office/Home Office)
Price Paid: $259.99
List Price: $399.99
Purchased from: NewEgg.com
Overall Rating: * * * * (four out of five stars)

Specifications:

8 PPM Color or Monochrome Speed
Laser w/4 Toners CMY+B
Mac OS/X 10.2 or Later/Windows 2K-Vista
USB or Ethernet 10/100 Base-T
Single Pass Printing
250 Sheet Input Tray
125 Sheet Output Tray
Duty Cycle of 35K Pages Per Month
600 x 600 Resolution
HP ImageREt 2400
Low 47 dbA Noise Level
Motorola ColdFire 4e 264 MHz CPU
16 MB RAM
16 MB Flash Memory
20 Sec to 1st Page Out
2000-2500 Pages at 5% Coverage
16 x 18 x 15 Width, Depth, Height
120 VAC Input at 13 to190 Watts
Limited 1-Year Warranty

Package Contents:

Printer
Rear Drawer Cover
Stacker Backstop
Drivers/Operators Manual on CD
Quick Start Manual
No USB Cable Included

I personally do not care much for inkjet printers. This is mainly because I don't do a lot of color photo printing and in my experience, if you don't use an inkjet printer at least once or twice a week, you risk the ink drying out and damaging the print heads. On most brands of inkjet printers this can spell disaster. I lost two expensive Epson inkjet printers to this untimely demise. Typically for the cost for the parts and labor of installing a new print head, you can throw out an inkjet and by a new one. My other main gripe about inkjets, is the high cost of replacing the ink cartridges when they run out. This can result in per page printing costs in excess of .35 cents per page for 5% coverage color printing. They are also slow at printing. This is because they print in narrow bands as the paper is fed through. If you look at the output from an inkjet you can often see the banding stripes running across the width of the page. Lastly inkjet ink is usually water based ink, which is water soluble. So if your work gets rained on, or splashed, you can expect the ink to bleed and ruin your work.

So with the above reasons in mind and with color laser printer prices dropping, I decided to try a color laser printer for the first time. I had been watching the street price of the HP-2600n drop-off ever so slowly for several years now. The defining moment came recently when NewEgg sent me their weekly sales email with a $20 off instant rebate and free shipping to boot, via a secret promo code. This gave a final delivered price of $259 for the HP-2600n. This printer weighs in at 40LBs plus, so the free shipping saved me around $21 for 3-Day UPS ground delivery. One thing about NewEgg is that they are not consistent in their shipping prices. Its not unusual to see them drop the shipping cost, or even offer free shipping, but then jack up the sell price to make up for it. But in this case the NewEgg Fates aligned and both prices were reduced. I could not resist the final deal, so I went on-line, credit card in hand and pulled the trigger. I live in the Detroit area and find that if I order something before 11:00 AM Eastern Time on a Monday morning from NewEgg that they very consistently get it delivered to me by early Thursday afternoon the same week. So I watched with glee on Thursday afternoon as the UPS man struggled to carry a large heavy HP box up to my front door. Moments later the packing tape was slashed open and the inner contents exposed. A chill went through me as I noticed a 3" hole in one corner of the box that I had not noticed when it was first delivered. One of the foam inserts also had a corner broken off. The UPS guy's must go through some kind of special training so they know to hold the box with the bad side towards them and away from the customer, while they distract you with their electronic clip board device. My fears quickly evaporated, when on closer inspection the damage was found to only be a flesh wound to the packing material. The styrofoam had performed its job and protected the precious plastic contents from UPS. On to the setup process. . .

I wanted everyone in the house to be able to print directly to the HP-2600n, so the Ethernet connection was the best way to go. Following the provided quick setup guide which consisted of a fold out map sized sheet of condensed setup diagrams and instructions. You start by opening the printer's front panel and removing each of the four toner cartridges. Each cartridge has a sealing tape that needs to be removed before use. This is pretty standard practice with laser printers. The tape is orange colored so its not hard to miss. Next I adjusted the input tray and inserted some 8.5 x 11" 24LB paper. No need for special high priced inkjet paper here. Snapped a small dust cover over the back of the 14" long tray and attached the stacker backstop. Color laser printers normally take up large amounts of counter-top space due to their large cubed shaped physical dimensions. It normally takes a lot of internal space to hold four good sized toner cartridges along with all of the motors, power supplies and mechanical parts that make up a typical laser printer. But HP engineers aligned the toners vertically in this printer and made use of an OPC belt to transfer the toner from the four cartridges to the paper. This results in a very compact foot print, single-pass four-color laser printer. The base of the printer is only 16" deep so it will fit on a standard depth credenza or counter top. Due to the 40LB weight, be sure to place the printer on a sturdy stand.

Lastly you hook up the AC power and a CAT-5e Ethernet cable and switch on the power rocker switch on the backside near the power cord. This completes the physical setup. Next comes the driver and nework setup. This involves manuual setting an IP address, subnet address and the address of the gateway into the printer's control panel. This process was made more difficult sinice HP did not see fit to include a back menu button or a number pad. Fortunately you only have to perform this task once. Tip #1 when entering an IP address use a fixed value above your router's normal DHCP range. I used: 192.168.1.175. Never use DHCP mode. With DHCP the printer address will constantly shift and your clients will be unable to print to it. Tip #2, when entering the subnet address use the opposite arrow key to start counting from 255-0, versus counting up 1, 2, 3 - 255 Etc. Lastly you enter the gateway address. This is normally the base address for your network's router. With a Linksys router you would enter: 192.168.1.1. See your router's user manual for more info. There are also several software methods to determine your gateway address, including IPCONFIG, clicking on the properties for your NIC card on your client PC, Etc. Record the settings you selected for future reference.

Each PC on your network that wants to use this printer will need a driver installed. Start by inserting the included CD-ROM driver disk and select either the USB or the Ethernet setup. I selected the Ethernet method and used the network browse feature to find the printer on my LAN network. HP's driver setup program took over from there and installed the drivers and the Toolbox software into Windows. One thing nice about this printer, it uses a web browser based user interface, at least with the Ethernet connector, the USB driver might work differently. This means there is no annoyiing control panel utility that constantly has to load and eat into your Windows resources. The status page has nice colorful gas gauges to indicate the amount of toner remaining in each cartridge. Every option and feature including diagnostic tests are available via this browser interface. A desktop icon automatically opens the default browser window and displays the printer status after a few seconds. Within the browser interface the following functions are offered: Printer Status, Trouble Shooting, Alerts and the Printer Documentation. This would be a good time to print out a configuration page and verify your configuration settings.

Several demo and test modes are also offered so I printed a demo page. This prints a Christmas picture of a toy train that uses about a 1/2 sheet of letter sized paper. Another full page sample prints a picture of a very colorful Iquana against a green leafy background. Both images were obviously custom tweaked to look their best on this printer. They do come out gorgeous though. Your family and friends will be most impressed. When printing photos and charts use thicker paper that is somewhat glossy and has a high whiteness rating for best results. I used Navigator brand 24LB ultra bright paper with an ISO brightness of 112 and a GE brightness rating of 99. The toner naturally imparts a glossy appearance without the need to use expensive glossy paper stock. Bond paper, high gloss photo, card stock and even transparencies can all be used with this printer. You should adjust the print driver according to the type of paper you have loaded. Bond and thicker papers require a higher fuser temperature to completely fuse the toner to the paper. An envelope feed slot is also provided. A mechanical gauge indicates the main paper tray level. My only complaint here is that its gray against gray which makes it hard to view from across a room. My old HP 4P monochrome laser printer, which is about 13 years old, has a bright orange tab that protrudes from the paper tray making it easier to view against the gray colored tray. A bright orange paint pen solved this issue real quick.

Because this printer only has four colors of toner to work with: Cyan Magenta, Yellow and Black, its ability to print subtle color shades is somewhat limted. Inkjet printers that are optimized for photo printing usually offer additional colors like Light Cyan and Light Magenta to aid in printing flesh tones. Text quality overall is excellent. I was able to print down to 4-point type and still have it fully ledgible. This is mostly due to HP's ImageREt 2400 technology, which varies the size of the laser dots to achieve near 2400 DPI text quality. This eliminates the chinkiness that kills the text quality of some other brands of laser printers. LED printers are adversely affected by this limitation due to their fixed dot sizes and spacings.

The paper path is a vertical "U" shape versus the more common horizontal "S" paper paths used on most other laser printers. This should theorectically help reduce the chances of a paper jam during extremely humid, or dry weather. The color toner cartidges are rated at 2000 printed pages at 5% coverage. The slightly larger black toner is rated at 2200 pages. The cost for repalcement toner cartridges is about $80 apiece on NewEgg for HP brand toners. This results in a cost of about .15 cents per color page printed, or less than half the cost of most inkjet printers. Remanuifactured toners can be purchased for around $46.00 per toner, which further cuts the per page cost down to about .092 cents per page. This is about one fourth the cost of four-color Inkjet printers. Six color inkjets are even more expensive to operate. Yes you can take your inkjet cartridges and have them refilled, which will help cut the cost of inkjet printing, but you are still stuck with a cartridge that has a very short lifespan before it dries up. In my experience reilled inkjet cartridges take even longer for the inks to set than their brand name versions. This can leave you with wet soggy output that will take-5-10 minutes to completely dry. During that time you have to guard your output against any smears and smudges. To get glossy output on an inkjet you need very expensive, glossy photo paper, which takes even longer for the ink to dry. Its not unusual for water based inks to take up to several days to completely set when used on glossy paper.

After living with my new color laser printer for about a month now I could not be happier with it. Yes there are other color laser printers out there that offer more features, or better photo quality, but none that I am aware of at this price point with an Ethernet jack included. I work out of a small den so my work space is limited. This printer was able to replace a dead Epson inkjet printer while actually consuming less overall desk space on top of my credenza. The small LCD screen is really not a Con on this printer because its a network printer, most users won't even be in the same room with it to be inconvenienced. This printer is designed to support a small workgroup. I would limit it to a workgroup that consists of no more than 10 people. If you do a lot of color printing then you might want to invest in a larger and faster printer. The printer also runs an automatic cleaning cycle after every print job. The first time I heard this I thought someone else was sending a print job, because it makes the same sounds. It even sounds like its feeding a sheet of paper, but its not. The cleaning cycle takes about 30 seconds, during this time, you will not be able to use the printer. You can still send a print job, but it won't print until the cleaning cycle completes. To its credit the printer does wait several minutes before it initiates is cleaning cycle.

Cons: Its kind of slow at 8 PPM by most modern laser printer standards, but faster than similar priced inkjet printers. Photo quality is not as good as highend photo inkjet printers, but not bad for a small color laser printer. No USB or network patch cable is included. The LCD panel is too small and hard to read. No automated duplex printing, manual only. Frequent cleaning cycles after each use.

Pros: Excellent price versus color print quality, without the fear of ink smudges that can occur with inkjet printers. Reduced output cost as compared to inkjet printers. The network port is an unexpected bonus in this price range. Quiet operation with robust paper handling. Input tray holds half a ream of paper (250 sheets of 20LB paper). An optional second 250 page supply tray can also be added.

I gave the HP-2600n and overall rating of four out of five stars. If it had been faster and offered duplex printing I would have awarded it five stars.
(****)

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