Product Reviews

The price of colour laser printers has fallen dramatically in the past couple of years, but sadly multifunction peripherals (MFPs) haven't. HP is aiming to redress the balance with its Color LaserJet 2820, a printer, scanner and copier built on a four-pass colour laser engine.

Preparing the 2820 involves removing plenty of transit locks and inserting the imaging drum and toners, but we found this easy enough. HP's setup program successfully discovered the LaserJet over our network, but was slow to install files. It offers two options that require 75MB or 550MB of disk space, but no custom installation.

Setup creates two PCL drivers, one for colour and one for mono printing. We tried our print tests using both but mono print jobs were prone to brief pauses with the general-use driver. Using the mono driver doubled the speed to 15.2

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pages per minute (ppm), which we think is adequate. However, colour printing with our 24-page test document managed just 2.4ppm.

Print quality was fine, but photos suffered from noticeable grid-style dithering. The printer failed to complete one of our standard photo tests with an out-of-memory error message.

The connection we used seemed to dramatically affect scan times. Over USB, A4 previews took around 14 seconds; capturing a page at 300 dots per inch (dpi) took 36 seconds. When using the network connection, previews took twice as long, but the 300dpi scan was completed in just five seconds.

At higher resolutions, when we compared two 1,200dpi scans we noticed digital artefacts in the version made over a network connection. We wondered if the driver had simply enlarged the scan from a lower resolution preview. Both results were fine for office work, but we recommend using the USB connection for more creative needs.

Using the automatic document feeder, we were able to copy a 10-page mono document in just 52 seconds, or three minutes and five seconds in colour. Quality was OK, especially for mono text, which was legible for more than five generations.

This MFP is solid in most respects, but it is let down by its leisurely print performance and basic 125-sheet paper input tray. If you are prepared to pay £80 more, the Color LaserJet 2840 offers an extra 250-sheet cassette and fax capability.