HP Color Laserjet 4600DN

Reviewed by: Rclapper

Duration of ownership:

Strengths: Great print quality. OK speed, duplex, network, great driver & software, booklet printing, did I mention great print quality! Great software package as well!

Weaknesses: Toner is comparatively expensive. However, consider the yield & image quality the cost is not all that high. It is still ALLOT cheaper than having a print service run color copies or color prints!

Overall Evaluation: We use this printer in our office for printing brochures. We actually have two of them. The image quality is excellent, near photo quality. The images are somewhat glossy in appearance. Text and graphics are sharp and crisp. Although this is an older model it still prints great. You can find these refurbished for less than $1,000. However we have purchase 2 refurbished models in the past 2 years. Both had defective toners right out of the box. HP of course replaced them but at first we thought we had defective printers. The first one we bought about 2 years ago had a defective black toner. The one we bought recently, all 4 toners were defective. What was really interesting is those same toners printed much better in the older unit we have. The print was not perfect but still much better. HP replaced the toners free of charge and sent them via overnight delivery with return tags for the defective toners. Great support from HP! They also had spent several hours on the phone with me trying to trouble shoot the problem. We have had budget Minoltas and other sub $1000 units. I would buy this one again over any of the budget color laser printers. You can get into a brand new budget laser printer with network and duplex for about $700 but you can get this HP refurbished with delivery for less than $1,000. I plan to buy a color laser for my home. I can guarantee you it will be this same model as long as I can still find it. The only other color, network, duplex laser I would buy is the Dell 5100CN. It's good for office work groups but not nearly as good an image quality as the HP4600DN. You can find the Dell unit on special at $699 with free shipping or the occasional special of buy one get one free but at full retail. So that means you can get two for $999 + shipping + tax. Even at that price if you are printing anything other than text and graphics then I would suggest sticking with a refurbished HP4600DN. We have had our refurbished HP4600DN about 2 years now. We mostly print brochures with about 25% to 30% coverage per page. We've run our oldest printer through about 6 sets of color and 3 black toner cartridges. The 4600DN is still ticking right along with beautiful image quality and no problems. One more word about Dell. SUMMARY, if for graphics and text then go with the Dell 5100CN. If you need photo quality or as close as possible then go with the HP 4600DN. If you are more worried about support....On a scale of 1-10 Dell rates at about 14 and HP rates at about 9. However, we are a large business customer with Dell and we might carry more priority with Dell than a home customer. I don't know how well they treat home customers. I hope this review was helpful to you! Oh, one more thing about the HP. We wanted to know our ?real life cost? of printing our brochures in house rather than using a print service. We loaded the printer with all brand new toners and ran it non stop till the first toner ran empty. The other toners still had print life remaining but this was close enough for our needs. I don?t recall the total number of pages printed but I do remember our cost ended up being about 1/3rd of having an outside print service to print them and we did not have to leave our office to do it.