Tuesday, October 1, 2013

HP Color LaserJet 1600

The HP Color LaserJet 1600 is an entry level small business printer that seems to promise little but delivers much. It sits quite upright in a more vertical position, with a large flap at the front which hides the cartridges and the belt, which adds a lot to the ease of maintenance. The paper lives in the bottom, a 250 sheet drawer and a single feeder for envelopes and the like.

The printer comes packed almost ready to work. The cartridges are already in place and ready once you remove the travel tape. You just have to connect the USB, install the drivers and off you go. Couldnt be easier.

The driver package includes the user manual, PCL and PostScript drivers and a decent range of tools for operating the printer. Its easy to change color depth, toner use, and other features from the desktop, which we find much easier than pressing buttons on the device itself. There are only three to press, and a small LCD screen to look at. The screen shows the basic status information, toner level and not much more, but its all you need really.

Printed pages appear at a rate of around 6 per minute. The print quality is good, especially with text as each character appears well drawn, detailed and sharp, even at smaller points. Graphics and images are both printed well either mono or color, with defined gradients, good detail and even spread on larger pieces. There is a manual duplexer included which worked well, there were no jams or problems feeding the paper like we have seen in other manual printers.

The HP Color LaserJet 1600 is a decent, inexpensive printer to install and use. Running costs are reasonable as replacement toners are only around $56 for black (2500 pages) and $57 for colors (2000 pages). The easy access to the moving parts means freeing jams and replacing cartridges can be done in seconds. Print quality is good and reliability seems sound. A good option for those with smaller workloads who still want a quality printer.
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