Product Reviews

HP's venerable Color Laserjet 3800 family of printers gets its marching orders to be replaced by the CP3505 range, which HP claims is unique, as it has no replacement consumables other than the toner cartridge. It targets high-demand workgroups comprising up to ten users, and aims to provide the tools to strictly control their thirst for colour.

The CP3505x is at the top of the range and comes with an integral duplex unit and an extra 500-sheet lower tray. Build quality is up to HP's usual high standard, and the backlit LCD and control panel are easy to use. The four toner cartridges are accessed from behind the flip-down front panel, and the absence of any other consumables gives reasonable printing costs. All cartridges last for 6,000 pages and can deliver a colour page for 5.8p. At 1.4p per page, mono prints aren't such good value compared to rivals. Note Kyocera's FS-C5025N (web ID: 104995) costs 0.9p per mono page and 4p for colour.

Colour can be expensive if businesses can't control use, and HP now offers a range of tools collectively known as Color Access Control (CAC). From the printer's browser interface,

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you can view a job log showing colour-print jobs and the associated usernames. Activating the colour-permissions option lets you create a list of up to 50 users and determine who can print in colour or mono only. Applications can also be controlled, where a list of up to ten can be defined, each with their own colour- or mono-permits. The bundled Easy Printer Care software also offers some controls, although you can only switch off colour printing completely from here. Businesses with multiple Laserjet printers can use HP's optional WebJetAdmin tool to manage colour printing from a centralised console.

The CP3505x scored well in our speed tests, ripping through a 24-page Word document in 1min 7secs for a tidy 21.5ppm. Our 24-page colour DTP-style document was also handled efficiently, dropping in the upper output bin in the same time. The driver offers both 1,200 x 600dpi and interpolated 3,600dpi resolutions, and neither affected speed, although it was hard to spot a difference between them in output quality.

In our quality tests, the printer delivered crisp, sharp text right down to the smallest sizes, and it was only here we could see a minute difference between the two resolutions, with 1,200 x 600dpi marginally sharper. Colour photographs were sharp and vibrant with only minor banding, and our performance tests revealed colour fades with virtually no stepping. Also, grey shades using different mixes of cyan, magenta and yellow were faithfully reproduced.

The CP3505x isn't picture perfect, but it delivers an impressive printing package. Its prints are superior to Kyocera's FS-C5025N and it's faster for a similar price, while HP's colour-print controls could be invaluable.