HP Colour LaserJet 2700n review

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Verdict:

This quiet printer is easy to maintain and has low running costs. It isn't cheap to buy, but it comes with generous supplies that could in effect make it free to run for the lightest users. However, its print quality isn't especially high, and it's slow when printing in colour.

Review Date: 15 Mar 2007

Price when reviewed: £329

Supplier: http://uk.insight.com

Reviewed By: Simon Handby

Our Rating 4 stars out of 5

Like the two more expensive printers in the group, HP's Colour LaserJet 2700n uses toner cartridges that incorporate an imaging drum.

Every time you add more toner, you also replace the drum. Some manufacturers claim that this ensures more consistent image quality, but we've never seen any difference in our tests. It does mean that with only four consumables this printer is easy to maintain.

The 2700n arrives with colour cartridges that should last for a respectable 3,500 pages, and a generous 6,500-page black cartridge. Occasional users may never need to replace them, but reasonable prices make this the cheapest printer for most volumes of printing.

The 2700n is fairly well specified, with a network port and PCL and PostScript languages as standard. It arrives with its consumables in place, but they must be removed, prepared and refitted before you can print. This is simple, and HP's installer is quick and painless.

The 2700n is disappointingly slow when printing colour. Its 4.2ppm performance in our mixed-colour test was far short of its rated speed of 14ppm, and slower than two of the four-pass devices. It isn't a remarkably quick text printer either, but it was easily the fastest in this test to warm up and begin printing after a long idle period. If you print only short, occasional jobs, you may find it faster than a quick printer with a longer warm-up time.

This printer's black text was very good, but prints with graphics were less impressive. Our black-and-white test photo was murky and had a mild magenta cast. Colour graphics were better but, with a lack of vibrancy and some inaccurate colours, not up to the standard of Lexmark's C530dn.

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