Review: HP Color Laserjet 2600n printer

With the lowest price of any of the printers reviewed here, HP’s Color Laserjet 2600n is an excellent way of achieving high-speed colour printing for a minimal price.

The 2600n turns out full-colour pages at a rate of up to 8ppm, leaving many more expensive printers lagging at just over half its speed. It has a network interface as standard, an LCD status panel with control buttons and works with Windows and Macintosh systems.

Single-pass colour technology places the toner cartridges in a line, making refilling extremely easy and there’s no need to interact with menus or wait for toner carousels to rotate.

It’s this technology that allows the printer to achieve its high colour-printing speeds – the page goes straight through the printer in one pass at the full engine speed, rather than having to complete a separate pass for each colour of toner, which effectively slows the process down by a factor of four.

Unfortunately, the engine in the 2600n is rather slow, and switching to mono gains you no performance increase whatsoever.

It’s less than half the speed of its nearest rival when printing in black and white, which is a serious disadvantage if you’re hoping to introduce modest colour requirements to print jobs that contain many mono-only pages.

As is often the case with printers that are inexpensive, the true cost of the Laserjet 2600n is hidden in the high price of its consumables, which make it the most expensive printer of the group to run.

It’s also restricted to rather low-capacity cartridges, which could mean you have to replace them frequently.

Software installation is very easy with a good set of features in the Windows driver, although the print quality settings are curiously placed in the ‘Finishing’ section rather than in the section labelled ‘Paper/Quality’.

This is part of a group test on budget colour laser printers. Other articles are:
Introduction and editor's choice
Canon Laser Shot LBP 5200
Dell 3100cn
Epson Aculaser C1100N
Konica Minolta Magicolor 2430DL
Lexmark C510n
Oki C3200
Xerox Phaser 6120
The Real Cost of Printing