Product Reviews

HP's been busy. The new HP Color Laserjet 2605dn is another of the new breed of colour laser printer that's pushing the boundaries of affordability. This model provides PostScript 3 colour laser output at 600 x 600 lines per inch to networked Macs and PCs, allows duplex (two-sided) printing as standard and has a retail price of £299 plus VAT. In fact, you can already find it listed at just under £270 including VAT.

Considering that this is a full-blown network-ready colour laser printer, it's pretty compact, although HP's laser printer designs aren't the smallest around. The paper tray pulls out from the front, just below the hinged door that gives access to the toner cartridges and most of the paper-feed path.

Speaking of toner cartridges, these cost around £50 each, and HP estimates that the black lasts for 2500 prints and the colour ones last for 2000, based on the traditional 5% toner cover average. Not counting paper costs, this means prints cost between 2p and 2.5p per page, which isn't too bad. Of course, as with all printers, 5% coverage with each colour at once quadruples the toner use, and printing images and blocks of colour will generally cover more than 5%, so be prepared to change cartridges more often if this sounds like your kind of output.

In use, it's nice and quiet, something that not all laser printers can claim. As far as performance goes, it won't set the town alight with its speed - but, then, it isn't exactly a slouch, either. Its printer engine is rated at 10 pages per minute (ppm) for colour and 12ppm for black-and-white output. The slight difference

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is curious, given that it's a single-pass laser printer, but in the absence of concrete technical explanations, we put the performance difference down to only having 25% of the imaging work to do.

The Color Laserjet 2605dn handled our real-world speed tests well enough not to raise any concerns. For our full-page image output tests, it took 59 seconds for the greyscale image and one minute four seconds for colour, while it took 36 seconds to output the single-page desktop publishing PDF test.

With our simple text document tests, we timed it at 30 seconds for the first page (a little longer than the 20 seconds HP claims, but this was measured from clicking the Print button) and 90 seconds in total for 10 pages. At this speed, you'd need to print solidly for at least 3.5 hours a day, five days a week, to reach its monthly maximum duty cycle of 35,000 pages; 1400 pages a day isn't impossible, but not that likely for a small workgroup or team, and certainly not for one or two users.

We found that the line quality of its output was good; 2pt serif text remained crisp and fairly clear, and fine white text out of black and halftone grey on black were rendered admirably cleanly. Greyscale images and EPS line art graphics all looked good, with a decent tonal balance preserved in shadow and highlight detail in black-and-white photos. This made its handling of our colour tests all the more surprising; colour photographic imagery was printed with a dull appearance. There was no colour cast to criticise - apart from the lack of vitality, the colour balance was fine - but if you need output to impress, you won't find this fits the bill.

Ultimately, the HP Color Laserjet 2605dn offers a lot for its price tag, including single-pass colour laser printing, reasonable throughput speed, a usable 64MB of Ram, 10/100Base-T Ethernet networking, robust PostScript Level 3 emulation, built-in duplexing, and an office-pleasing lack of noise when running as well as on standby. The quality of its colour output wasn't quite what we had hoped for, but for business-oriented use - and indeed for black-and-white photographic output - this would be a good choice for budget network printing.