HP Color LaserJet 3800 review

HP is well known for its laser printers, and the HP Color LaserJet 3800 is one of the most recent additions to the range.

This is a colour laser printer that is aimed at a more demanding kind of user than the model we tested in our recent budget laser printers labs.To start with, this model is equipped with PostScript, ready for serious desktop publishing use. It is also billed as being fairly swift - 21 pages a minute in both mono and colour printing. It keeps its colour print speed up with its monochrome rate by virtue of its single-pass cartridge system, something that's becoming increasingly common in mid-level colour lasers. In real-world tests it performed perfectly adequately; its engine speed kept it going through our office-oriented tests, and its processor didn't struggle noticeably with our publishing-oriented tasks. It has a total of 96MB of RAM installed, which helped it stay on top of the job when working with more complex PostScript documents. In our experience this would be more than enough for almost all situations, although there's one memory slot free for an upgrade if required.

It has been designed to be easy to maintain, with the front face opening out to reveal the four toner cartridges ready for easy slot-in replacement. The fuser unit is found under a panel at the top, and lifts out easily. Its single usual paper tray holds 250 sheets, the standard capacity for a printer at this price point. The fold-out manual feed tray can hold a small number of envelopes or sheets of paper, but just for the record there's no relatively straight-through path for feeding particularly delicate or extra-thick stock; the paper does the usual 180-degree turn inside before passing the array of toner cartridges. We should point out that this is quite common, but you should bear it in mind if you might want to try taking this printer to its paper thickness limits.

The small LCD operator panel on the printer's front shows toner usage status when idle, and uses the standard form of step-through printer menu structure for configuring and checking the device. One handy extra that HP included in these menus was options for printing 20-page sets of colour swatch samples for both CMYK and RGB, with the CMYK percentages and RGB values shown by each swatch. This helps you know precisely what a given on-screen colour will look like when it comes out of this printer, and it also does away with the boring business of laying out colour samples manually - something that many design groups will have gone through in the past. Our only quibble about this feature is that something so useful to designers has been hidden away halfway down a set of options in a small LCD panel.

We liked the quality of the output very much; it handled fine text and lines well, and dealt with our colour and greyscale artwork as we'd hoped. As always, this kind of printer shouldn't be seen as a serious method of professional proofing, but in faking-it terms this was very convincing. We'd still turn to an inkjet printer for printing photographs, but for design work of all kinds this printer's output looks far more like the final litho-printed product than we've managed to get from desktop inkjet devices.

Like many HP printers, the Color LaserJet 3800 isn't what we'd call small, especially given that its single-pass cartridge system is more compact than most older 4-pass mechanisms. Having said that, it doesn't demand a lot of extra room around it. Access to the toner and virtually all of the paper path is from the swing-down door on the front, and both the regular paper tray and the manual feel shelf are presented on the front as well. Its ports panel is in a recess at the back, although curiously the power lead itself isn't part of this low-profile sockets approach. What you get for your £622 is a PostScript colour laser printer which churns out pretty accurate results in both mono and colour at quite impressive speeds. What you don't get is networking built in; instead, you'll have to connect directly using its USB cable. You can get an Ethernet network-ready model, the 3800n, for an extra £281, and HP offers an add-on wireless option for those who want it, but at this price-point you'll need to turn on printer sharing if others want to use it as well. Of course, whether you want to keep a printer of this quality to yourself or let your colleagues use it is your call.