The LaserJet 2600n is fairly bulky, but clever design makes it look compact. The paper cassette is located at the bottom, and fits snugly inside the body. It can hold up to 250 sheets; you can increase this by adding an optional paper cassette. A manual paper feed lets you feed in a single sheet at a time.
The 2600n is targeted at work-groups, so it has a two-line LCD display. This is placed at an awkward angle; you’ll have to bend to be able to see it, and it’s not backlit. It’s handy when setting up networking, or while troubleshooting. Apart from drivers, you also get Business Marketing Toolkit—links to How-Tos for marketing material, tutorials on Microsoft Office products, and more.
The front of the printer pops open to reveal the cartridges. Installation is simple. The developer unit is on the inside of the front panel, so you have to be careful not to drop anything on it.
HP claims 8 ppm for black printouts, and this one managed between 6 and 7. The same ppm speed is claimed for colour, but our six-page test document took 1 minute and 5 seconds to complete—reasonable for this category of printers.
The 2600n delivered crisp test printouts, and even 2-point text was sharply reproduced and perfectly legible. With the Combi-document, finer details were spot on, and even colour gradations were near-perfect. In the photo-target document, only skin tone lacked a little.
Thanks to its one-pass technology and Instant-On Fusing, the LaserJet 2600n is particularly at ease with small color documents. It can put out three or four pages in twenty or so seconds, while other printers are still in their warm-up phases. On the other hand, the 8 ppm printing engine was a little slow with monochrome output. It took three times as long to print 20 pages of text as some other models.
Print Quality
A lot of progress has clearly been made with the driver, compared to the first version of this printer, which we tested last year. This time around the colors were fairly accurate overall, and we noted very good reproduction of contrast on documents with a lot of black.
Cost Per Page
Since HP doesn't offer high-capacity cartridges for its LaserJet 2600n, and since the price recently increased by more than 20%, its cost per page was by far the highest of all the printers we tested: 5 cents for a black page and 22 cents for a color page. But ironically, on this model, that's not of major importance. Since the combined cost of the four cartridges is actually higher than that of the printer itself, it's actually better to replace the whole printer when the cartridges are empty. This also gives you the benefit of a fresh warranty.
No comments:
Post a Comment