HP Laserjet 2500n review

A couple of years ago, few SoHo users could afford a colour laser, forcing them to use an inkjet or an outside printing company. However, the recent push to bring colour into mainstream business has led to the availability of more affordable devices. Epson has already shown that colour laser printers can be reasonably priced with its £899 AcuLaser C1000 (see Reviews, issue 90, p129), and now HP and Minolta-QMS have joined the fight with two colour lasers that cost less than £1,000.

At just £600, the Minolta-QMS magicolor 2300 is the most affordable colour laser we've seen. Incredibly, Minolta-QMS has achieved this without sacrificing very many features. The 2300 uses a four-pass engine capable of 16ppm in mono and 4ppm in colour with a maximum resolution of 2,400 x 600dpi. The engine is driven by a 200MHz Power PC processor and 32MB of RAM is supplied as standard, although this can be upgraded to 288MB.

Connectivity features are good too, with USB, parallel and 10/100BaseTX Ethernet all included. You can also manage aspects of the 2300 using a web browser and there's a small LCD panel for configuring settings.

There is evidence of some cost-cutting, though, most notably the lack of PCL or PostScript language support. This means print jobs will be processed first on the host computer, which could reduce performance of large jobs. The paper capacity of 200 sheets isn't brilliant either, but you can't expect all the features for just £600.

HP isn't generally known for offering the most affordable prices, so we were surprised to see its new Laserjet 2500n come in at only £999. However, this is still £400 more than the 2300.

The 2500n is also a four-pass printer with 16ppm mono and 4ppm colour print speeds. Unlike the 2300, though, the 2500n features a 600 x 600dpi print engine, albeit boosted by HP's ImageREt 2400 colour-layering technology. The 2500n boasts a 300MHz processor and 64MB of RAM - twice as much as the 2300 - which can be expanded to a maximum of 256MB.

Connectivity features are identical too, with USB, parallel and Ethernet ports. The 2500n also has a built-in web server for browser-based management. The features list continues with PCL6 and PCL5c support and PostScript 3 emulation. Paper handling is also better than the 2300, with a 250-sheet main input tray supplemented by a 125-sheet multipurpose tray.

To test the printers, we installed them on a small network. This immediately caused the 2300 a few problems, as its network-installation Wizard refused to work, requiring a manual installation. In contrast, HP's software detected and configured the 2500n first time and we were up and running straight away.

Plain text documents and letters with colour logos posed no problem to either printer - both returned flawless scores of 16ppm in the mono document test and 4ppm in the colour letter test. Next was our Excel spreadsheet test, which uses black text on a solid yellow background. Both printers felt the strain, with the 2500n slowing to 3.1ppm and the 2300 to 3.6ppm. Output quality was good on both, although the HP's solid yellow and sharp characters were well ahead of the 2300's more speckled output.

The 2500n struggled slightly with our 24-page DTP document, dropping to 2.4ppm, but output quality was good. The 2300 performed well too, giving slightly more detail to images, although with more grain. It was also faster, printing at the full 4ppm engine speed.

The final tests were our quality and photo documents. These separated the two to some extent, with the 2500n producing excellent results, while the 2300 was far less convincing, with some distortion in the photo test.