HP Color LaserJet CP2025n

The squat, round-cornered CP2025n offered middling speed but impressive print quality in our tests. HP carefully claims an engine speed of "up to 21 ppm" (pages per minute). The printer came reasonably close, hitting 17.5 ppm when printing plain text. Its graphics speed of 4.2 ppm is pretty good compared with the competition. And the results were generally quite nice: very crisp, black text; fairly natural colors (sometimes tending toward yellow or cyan); and haziness just in some of the finer details, like pinstripes and delicate flowers. Only grayscale photos stymied it, with prints looking greenish, dark, and grainy.

Although the printer's performance should please most people, its design and configuration may not. The control panel--a two-line, monochrome LCD and adjacent navigation buttons--is simple. Its 250-sheet input tray and 150-sheet output tray are adequate; it also has a 50-sheet multipurpose tray. Manual duplexing with prompts is available; you reload sheets into the multipurpose tray, which is unusual but not inconvenient. A second, 250-sheet input tray costs $149. But overall, the parts feel cheap or awkward. Paper-tray markings are minimal. Moveable parts tend to jiggle, wiggle, or rattle. If you extend the input tray to accommodate legal-size media, it sticks out awkwardly.