Photograph: Rick Rizner
The HP Color LaserJet 2550L is so compact you can hardly believe it's a color laser printer. The neat exterior conceals a clever carousel design that squeezes the toner and rollers into a surprisingly small space.
At $499, this unit's price looks like a bargain, too. However, to achieve that price it sacrifices some of the amenities found in other models. For example, you connect it to your PC only through its parallel or USB 2.0 port. There is no built-in networking, so to share it with your coworkers you'll need to go through Windows or buy an external print server (starting at $130 from HP or $50 to $100 for a third-party unit).
Out of the box, the 2550L's simple fold-out paper tray holds only 125 sheets. However, you can easily boost the capacity by adding a proper 250-sheet drawer, reasonably priced at $150. You can also add a 500-sheet drawer for $300, taking the maximum paper capacity up to 875 sheets. The output bin on top of the printer holds only 125 sheets, while the straight paper path exiting at the rear spits out paper and thicker media one sheet at a time, with no tray to support the output paper. Unfortunately, HP does not offer a duplexer attachment. If you expect to upgrade your printer, the $699 Color LaserJet 2550n might be a better starting point, with its built-in networking and the 250-sheet drawer already attached.
Another drawback: This could be an expensive printer to run. HP estimates that the black toner cartridges will last for 5000 pages (based on the industry-standard assumption of covering 5 percent of a page with black ink); these cartridges cost $83. The printer comes with color toner cartridges yielding only 2000 pages, but replacements capable of generating 4000 pages are available for $100. The $174 imaging drum, which HP says will last for 20,000 monochrome pages or 5000 color pages, also bumps up per-page costs. If you print high quantities of color photos, covering far more than 5 percent of the page, your costs will be much higher.
In our PC World Test Center evaluation, the 2550L took its time printing our test pages. It printed text at a leisurely 8.6 pages per minute, compared with the 12.8-ppm average of the small-office color laser printers we tested for our February 2005 issue. Color pages emerged at a miserable 1.1 ppm, by far the slowest of the batch.
In our quality tests, the 2550L's text printing was unimpressive. While the smallest fonts were quite readable, characters looked mostly too heavy, and the solid internals of larger letters looked blotchy. Our line-art sample came out better, with barely visible banding and close parallel lines that stayed distinct, if a little light. Reproduction of our grayscale image was very good, revealing smooth skin tones and good detail in dark areas. We saw some thin banding, but textured clothing in the image showed very little moiré. The color images looked a bit dark overall, but sharp.
As configured, without networking, the 2550L was a breeze to install on our test PC. The multiple-language Start guide walked us through assembly with clear, two-color line drawings. A comprehensive Use manual is included on the software CD-ROM as both Windows Help and PDF files. The control panel lacks an LCD screen, but a set of colored LEDs and three dedicated buttons make operation simple.
Upshot: Sleek and low-priced, the LaserJet 2550L seems promising for small offices, but its speed and print quality aren't stellar.
Paul Jasper
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