Color LaserJet 5500 Series

High speed wide format printing for superior colour documents from the HP Color laserjet 5500 laser printer. Discount HP and compatible laser toner cartridges available.

HP Color LaserJet 5500dn Review

 The HP Color LaserJet 5500dn is big, nonetheless definitely not as huge as various other colour laser printers. It's actually quick, with a rating of 21 pages per minute, but others are actually quicker. And it's actually less costly as compared to other colour products. Whilst it has a small number of disadvantages, the HP printer nonetheless has a number of attributes making it attractive for the purpose of network colour printing.

Similar to a number of other colour printers, the engine within the 5500dn uses a single-pass model, permitting the unit to print colour pages about as fast as black-and-white pages. The toner cartridges and imaging drums have been organized in a vertical stack, lending the machine a smaller footprint compared to the majority of colour laser printers: merely 27.7 by 43 inches. Yet at 132 pounds, the 5500dn still calls for two people to move it round the workplace.

The setup operation is easy and also properly documented in the manual. The delivery box may well be taken apart around the unit, making it simple to lift up the machine in to place. And unlike most printers, that can fit only a few lines of text along the front-panel LCDs, the 5500dn includes a visual display which shows animated illustrations of the measures necessary to clear a paper jam, bar charts of toner levels, and other pictorial data, in addition to conventional text messages.

The network options that come with the 5500dn are comparable to those of the monochrome HP LaserJet 4200dtn. The unit is easy to set up for the purpose of shared utilization on a network, including IPP printing on the Internet. The driver offers access to the printer's numerous features and simplifies tasks as complex as printing an extended document as a properly paginated booklet using the duplex feature.

In terms of overall performance, the 5500dn was in third spot among the colour printers in the speed tests, in keeping with its third-place engine speed rankings. Yet when we printed the CorelDraw and Photoshop documents for the quality testing, it finished the work in the least time. (Since speed happens to be not so pertinent any time evaluating quality, we did not post these results.)

The 5500dn is a great model weighed against others from only a few years back, however it does not really fit with the current best of breed. On our tests, text was razor-sharp, yet faint vertical banding was noticeable on a few pages using the HP Color LaserJet 5500dn toner cartridges. This became particularly apparent in big regions of graduated colours and also solid black. Details like fine lines printed upon black backgrounds were sometimes lost. On the other hand, photos seemed good, with no evidence of posterization in delicate shade shifts.

The Color LaserJet 5500dn is definitely an attractive performer which provides an effective balance of speed and quality for the price tag. It's a fine answer for numerous applications, but others may be more suitable if you want the most impressive image quality or perhaps the fastest print speeds.