HP Color Laserjet 2550L

Not that long ago you could easily have paid several thousand pounds for a colour laser printer. However, prices have fallen dramatically in the past year or so, and HP's Color Laserjet 2550L is one of the cheapest colour lasers we've seen.

The basic model costs £349. It has 600dpi resolution, 64MB of built-in memory, and a 125-sheet paper tray, as well as both parallel and USB interfaces. HP has two other, more expensive, models: the 2550LN has an Ethernet port and built-in printer server, and costs £399, while the 2550N includes the print server along with an additional 200-sheet paper tray and comes in at £459.

The 2550L is rated at 19 pages per minute (ppm) for black and white output, and 4ppm for colour. In practice, this worked out at just 90 seconds to print 10 pages of typical text documents, and a healthy 45 seconds for A4 printouts of large colour photographs.

You can't use glossy photo paper as you can with a colour inkjet printer, so this isn't the best choice for photographic printing. However, the Laserjet 2550L can handle glossy paper stocks that are suitable for printing sales brochures and other types of marketing material, so it's a good choice for business users who need greater performance and versatility than offered by an ordinary inkjet printer.

The toner cartridges seem expensive, costing £55-£60 for each of the four coloured toners. But according to HP's estimates this works out at about 1p per page for mono and 10p-20p for colour.

This is a good option if you want a high-performance laser printer that can also provide small-scale colour printing for reports, presentations and marketing materials.

Contact: HP 08705 474 747
www.hp.co.uk

Specifications

• 100-sheet input tray, 100-sheet output tray
• 19ppm black and white, 4ppm colour
• 600dpi resolution
• Four toner cartridges
• 64MB memory
• USB and parallel ports
• Ethernet and 200-sheet input tray available as extras