Customer Reviews

HP CP2025N Color LaserJet Printer

5 star:		(10)
4 star:		(8)
3 star:		(6)
2 star:		(2)
1 star:		(3)

 

 

I bought several Epson ink jet printers over the last few years. 80% of the time I was just printing black text, hardly any pictures. Clogged nozzles and high costs for the ink made me move to a LaserJet printer. All was well and then the wife said I could upgrade and go to a color printer.

I bought the printer, connected to my 24" iMac directly by USB. I did not install the driver included on the CD but I was still able to add it as a printer. My test print worked fine.

I them moved the printer to my Time Capsule and set it up there. Again, my test print worked fine. Now my ball and chain can also print to the printer from her MacBook.

I will never go back to an ink jet printer. The print quality is good.

My one issue with this printer is that I have not been able to set up some kind of draft setting so that I could save ink. If I do, I will update the review.

I bought this printer about a year ago upon the recommendation of my local IT support company; they also installed it as a stand alone printer with my Toshiba laptop which has Windows XP. After having dealt with inkjet printers and their cartridges I wanted something more robust and simple to use, hence color laserjet printer

Positive points :

- it works without any problems and has not jammed yet

- Black and white print quality is excellent, color is okay, but for photos it's
not anywhere near as good as a good inkjet printer, such as Canon, will do

- Speed is okay, but not particularly fast

Negative points :

- Toner consumption is relatively high, and toners cartridges are very expensive

- HP Customer Service consists of trying to sell you additional items; they can't
even answer a question about their HP photo paper availability, and they don't
have an organized listing of all HP paper formats/qualities

- Be aware that you should NOT use photo paper designed for inkjet printers; it
will likely melt due to the intense heat of the fuser ! This forces you to buy
genuine HP photo paper. This is not even mentioned in the user manual

- HP ToolboxFX which is supposed to help you maintain your printer never worked
correctly on my laptop. Again, no support is available on HP's website how to
make this work

- User manual discusses actual print tasks on only 4 pages (out of 154 total
pages) : not very comprehensive

- Duplex printing can be done, but is not explained in detail

It is sad to see that reputable companies, such as HP, have such poor customer service that seems designed to sell you things, not solve customers' problems with a specific product. Yes, HP offers all sorts of free on-line general classes about computers and printers, but very little SPECIFIC product support that is easily accessible

Everything about the printer is good, except the ink cartridges are expensive and it doesn't come with full cartridges. After about 600 copies the machine says I need to purchase another black cartridge. A full cartridge should print 3x that amount.

I love this printer. I have it wired to my home network, and we print to it from four different computers. Between my work, my spouse's work, and our children's homework, this printer is running constantly. It gives great prints every time. You have to accept the fact that the printing process generates heat and tends to make each page curl as it prints, but that is easily fixed by bending the prints backward after they come off the printer. Be sure you use only genuine HP print cartriges. They last a lot longer and I have not had good print quality with the cheaper "compatible" cartridges.

02/13/2010 Update: Turned power off. Uninstalled the printer. Pulled out the toner tray and pulled each toner catridge out and reseated.

I had ordered an HP e520t a few months back and had hard drive failure errors until I pulled and reconnected all hdd power plugs...everything has rocked since then. Possibly same issue here I thought. It seems that components get jostled around during shipping and need reconnecting/reseating. Always a good idea to pull and reconnect as much as possible when a shipped pc or peripheral is received.


Powered back up and during install I let windows automatically download the drivers for this printer (PCL 6). Did not install the PCL or PS drivers from HP's website. Calibrated via the onboard display menu. Printed first page and the output was as expected. Very nice, crisp, text and graphics. No more blurry colors. Exactly what I was hoping for. I am very pleased.

My thoughts now are that it wasn't so much the drivers, but that the color toner cartidges (black was printing very crisp during the problem) were not seated properly so it affected alignment or output in some way, causing blur.

****Rating is now 4 stars, versus the previous 1 star, since HP has had enough time to release Windows 7 64 bit compatible full featured software, but hasn't. HP says it will be forthcoming in the very near future.

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Previous post:
Be very careful if you're thinking about buying this printer and are running Windows 7. You can throw the included software away and expect to download universal ps or pcl print drivers (generic) from HP's website. This is problematic for soooo many reasons. After 4 hours of "tweaking" various settings and making some improvement, I still come up with fuzzy, blurry, text and graphics. I've talked to HP CS and read just about every printer forum know to man. Forget it. I wouldn't dare attempt to print anything professional with this thing to send to clients. It will collect dust until HP gets its act together and releases the software and drivers meant for this printer.

Buyer beware. I received this printer from my company for my home office and after 5 months it completely stopped working due to an error code that I cannot reset on the printer. After installing a replacement ink cartridge you, too, are likely to receive an error code telling you to "remove shipping lock" from the replaced ink cartridge even if you have already removed the shipping lock (which is a plastic strip you pull out before installation). After a month of Googling a solution and many hours on the phone with HP...you guessed it...still sitting here with this non-functioning lemon. All you have to do is Google "remove shipping lock from HP CP 2025" and you will discover a plethora of bloggers complaining about this darn printer. I WOULD NEVER SPEND MY OWN MONEY ON THIS MACHINE. Thankfully my company paid for mine but the frustration level is the same and trust me...the level is HIGH!!! What a pain in the you-know-what to waste my time on a problem that HP is well aware of yet cannot seem to figure out how to repair. Take it from me and all of the other frustrated CP2025 owners and buy another brand. After reading the blogs I sense this problem crosses over to other HP models as well.

This printer prints beautifully in color. I can't fault the quality of the printing. It's also a pretty cheap printer for color laserjet. I upgraded from a B&W laser to this. I've been using it about 6 months now.
The cons:
1) It's fairly slow especially with the duplexer. If you print large jobs, I would recommend a faster printer.
2) The toner is horrendously expensive, even non-OEM. Each cartridge only prints 3000 pages.
3) Even if you print in B&W, it still uses color ink. So you buy 4 cartridges (black, cyan, yellow, magenta), each say 3000 pg yield. You print 3000 pages and all 4 cartridges need to be replaced. Yikes.
4) It doesn't work well with older computers. I used it on a Windows XP machine with only 1G RAM and it took well over a minute from the time you submitted a print job until the time the first page began to print. On Windows 7 with 4G RAM, the delay is only about 10 seconds.

Color is just a nicety for me; I use it occasionally but don't absolutely need it. I mistakenly thought that with the separate toner cartrides, that I could just print in B&W and only use the black toner. If I had it to do over again, I would buy a faster B&W printer with cheaper toner. The cost to print one B&W page on this machine is about 4 times more than my old one and that is running in override mode with empty color cartridges loaded so it only uses black. With all 4 cartridges in there, I bet it's like 10-16 times more expensive. I wouldn't buy it again.

The quality of the text print is second to none! I do not use this for photos, however. It creates a very professional look -- one you cannot get with an ink-jet. Many documents I create have faint watermarks and the printing is phenomenal.

HP says their ink cartridges produce 2600 pages. This is baloney. Actually 500 is closer to the truth!

I use this printer often and the cartridges started to get costly so I switched to refurbished cartridges. For about $40 you can get cartridges from "Sophia Global." I've already been through about a dozen refurbished cartridges and I cannot tell the difference between them and the HP cartridges. The quality is 100% equal.

Sophia Global has better customer service than Office Depot or Staples (or HP for that matter).

The only gripe is that this printer is loud and goes through a self-cleaning several times a day -- so all of a sudden it starts the cleaning process out of nowhere and scares the daylights out of me.

I have 2 HP 2025DNs. They are quite good machines, and I have had one for almost 3 years, and the other for about 2 years. They have received light-to-moderate use (I have replaced black ink cartridge with HP brand ones about 4-5 times on each one, and color cartridges maybe 2-3 times) Unfortunately one of them has developed an infuriating problem in that it will go into 'cleaning' mode every 3 pages, and then 'Misprint' if you print 2-sided. Although I am out of warrantee, I thought I would get help from HP since a web search revealed this is a bug experienced by at least dozens of people. I only got a formal 'out of warranty' response and some canned instructions, which involve using a software called HP Toolbox FX...these instructions might work, but unfortunately (and strangely) the Toolbox software is not available for download from HP site. (I beleive the software may be on the original CD that came with printer, but that seems to be the only place you'll find it, so hold onto the CD. You cant download it from HP site.)

Generally a solid printer, which prior to this problem, I would have recommended wholeheartedly. Now I have reservations... I would still recommend it, particularly considering that the alternatives are likely to have their own issues too. But if you do get one consider possibility of buying support plan for it or possibly needing to pay-as-you-go for HP support to resolve your problems that develop as a result of some kind of latent bug in the automatic cleaning system.

I purchased this printer about a year ago and I noticed that whenever I did multiple prints the printer would error out and a message would come up saying misprint and press "ok" to continue. This would occur over and over again. This issue also caused wasted pages as the printer would print the same page twice. I got fed up today and decided to research the problem on an HP forum and also on the internet; to my horror this problem is rampant with this model. It also seems that HP is non responsive in dealing with this issue -signs of a company going down hill and only existing on "old glory". Before you purchase, I invite you to do a search on "HP 2025 misprint error". I hope this warning helps.