HP’s latest, budget colour laser printer breaks the £200 price barrier
Colour laser printers are now much more affordable and a lot cheaper to run than inkjets.
The HP Color LaserJet 1600 comes in at just £200, a price that could make it affordable for some homes as well as small offices.
Looks wise, it is a big machine, with an unusual design.
At the bottom is a 250-sheet paper tray and above this is a single sheet feed for envelopes and special papers. It’s good to see both these paper feeds, as some recent budget colour lasers have only a main feed tray, or only a multi-purpose one. The front panel folds down to give access to the four toner cartridges and pages exit onto the printer’s flat top-surface.
There’s a 16-character LCD display, though this isn’t as easy to read as some, as it’s quite deep-set and has no back-light. At the back is a single USB 2 socket; the only way to connect the printer to a PC.
Software comprises the printer driver and a toolbox, most of which is concerned with ordering new supplies such as toners and paper. There are four cartridges, with the colour ones capable of 2,000 pages and the black 25 per cent more, at 2,500 pages.
Colour prints from the Color LaserJet 1600 come out with crisp, clean blacks and a good colour spread, if a bit over-vivid. This can be adjusted from the printer’s software driver. We also noticed a bit of text fuzziness when printing black text over a coloured background.
However, it doesn’t bode well when the cost of replacing the toner cartridges for a laser printer cost the same as the printer itself. With each of the four here costing just under £50, it’s getting close.
Perhaps that’s why HP includes ‘starter’ cartridges with the printer, with a capacity of only 1,000 pages each. This is becoming a common practice with printer makers as a way of keeping the printer price down.
The HP Color LaserJet 1600 is not the cheapest laser printer of its type to run, with costs of around 2.5p for a black page and 10.5p for a colour one, but it’s easy to use and prints reasonably quickly.
