HP LaserJet 2600N review

We haven't seen a printer quite like HP's 2600N before. It costs about the same as other entry-level colour lasers, but it has a network interface and LCD control panel as standard.

This colour laser printer doesn't use the four-pass technology we'd expect at this price, either. Both colour and mono pages are created in a single pass, though at the rate of just eight per minute. In mono, this makes the 2600N the slowest laser we've seen for some time. Even the most basic black-only printers can manage 12ppm, and entry-level colour devices normally reach 18ppm or above. HP's unusual approach is designed to deliver prints at high speeds, however. Here the 2600N keeps pace with the very quickest four-pass lasers.

The 2600N seems to be an easy printer to live with, requiring little more desk space than the mono Samsung laser reviewed opposite. It successfully leased an IP address on our Labs network , and HP's setup program detected and configured it without incident. Paper takes a straight path into a 125-sheet output tray from the 250-sheet input cassette or manual feed. There is no rotating carousel, either, so it's exceptionally quiet while it's printing.

Eight pages per minute seems remarkably slow these days. Our 50-page mono tests each took nearly six and a half minutes, sauntering into the 2600N's output tray at 7.8ppm. In colour, the longer spool times for our complex 24-page document reduced the 2600N to just 6.2ppm, but this is still ahead of its best entry-level competitors.

The HP's print quality is fine, with excellent mono text. Its vibrant colour output is suited to business presentations, but our test photographs were grainy with inaccurate colours. None of the colour settings cured this or could stop a couple of images being printed with curious blemishes.

The 2600N uses new consumables that weren't widely available as we went to press. HP was keen to stress that its guide figures hadn't yet been finalised, but using them we calculated that pages should cost 2.3p in mono or 9.5p in colour. This is a little higher than the competition, but we'd expect to see both prices fall in time.

Given the 2600N's slow mono printing speeds, most users may want to pay more for a network-ready four-pass competitor. Still, this laser is very good value if you need a quick and robust colour printer for a small business network.