Customer Reviews

HP Color LaserJet 2550N Printer

5 star:		(1)
4 star:		(2)
3 star:		(4)
2 star:		(3)
1 star:		(9)

 

 

I bought the printer because I read reviews saying that it had excellent print quality. The fact that it was supposed to be noisy and slow was ok, since I don't print high volumes and the price of the printer is very good for a network color laser.

I found the print quality to be disappointing, however. It's better than an inkjet but not nearly as sharp as a monochrome laser. I can't tell whether it's worse than comparable color lasers--it's just not as good as I expected.

The thing that really ticked me off is that the cartridges expire after a set number of pages even if there's ink left in them. At $600 for a replacement set of cartridges, this sleazy trick can make a sizeable difference in operating cost. The effect is even worse when you get an error with a stream of mis-printed pages with just a couple of characters on each page. Better be around the printer to make sure there's no error that spews out 50 pages of gibberish (there goes $10). I hope HP cleans up its act now that Fiorina is gone, because a reputation for sleaziness is easy to get and hard to recover from. At least the printer shipped with full cartridges, not half-empty ones (a trick other companies use).

On the plus side, HP's customer support was excellent. Initially, the printer would sometimes work and sometimes not, completely unpredictably. The HP representative correctly diagnosed the problem as a physical problem with the Ethernet cable. To my surprise, replacing the Ethernet cable fixed all the problems. The rep was bright, spoke flawless English and fixed the problem quickly. Overall the support was outstanding.

On the plus side: low price for a color network laser, relatively compact size, reasonable printing cost per page, reliable operation, user-friendly software, excellent HP support.

On the minus side: slow speed, noisy operation, built-in electronic cartridge expiration counter, disappointing print quality (not awful, but not as good as expected from reviews).

Overall, the questionable print quality tips the scale against rating this printer higher.

I have liked HP printers in the past and have been very pleased with my LaserJet 5L which I have owned for ten years. To take advantage of HPs trade in program, I decided to upgrade to a 2550n color laser printer. I read the first review here, on this printer and dismissed the low rating as a fluke. I purchased the printer anyway, and then became disgusted.

First, it failed right out of the box. I was very careful to follow each instruction to the letter and once everything was installed, the failure light would turn on after cycling through the cartridges a few times. After I power cycled it a few times, it finally passed it's diagnostics and was ready. I print a test page, it looks good. I print another and it fails. Power cycle again, the printer is ready. I print two more test pages and it fails again. This flakey behavior continued again after I connected the printer to my PC. I could print a few pages once, then again, but after the third or fourth time it would randomly fail. This had nothing to do with paper jams, but seemed to occur when switching from one color cartridge to another. The simple LEDs that flash at you tell nothing about what is wrong, so I would strongly recommend buying a printer with a LCD display.

The software was difficult to install, especially when I wanted to have it use the ethernet port instead of the USB interface. The printer options are very minimal and not comparable to printers like the Samsung CLP-510n which allow things like printing multiple pages on the same sheet. By the way, I don't necessarily recommend the Samsung printer but the user manual can be downloaded from their web site and the printing options are quite comprehensive.

If the LaserJet 2550n would remain idle for 20-30 minutes, it would suddenly spring to life and make all sorts of noises when there was nothing to print. It sounded like the cartridges were tumbling around. Why can't it do something like this immediately and then just stay quiet? When printing, it is also quite noisy as it cycles through the cartridges.

The printer is slow. I sent it a picture and it took slightly over a minute. I did it immediately again (it should be all warmed up) and it still took another minute. The processor inside the printer is too slow and real-world page per minute numbers may be disappointing. The only real positive thing I could say is the print quality was good, even for pictures, provided that they are not expanded in size.

Some people like the OKI C5150n or the Brother HL-2700cn. I haven't seen what the Brother prints like, but the OKI is quiet and print quality is as good as the HP while printing much faster. Dell also sells a color printer in this class, the 3100cn. Although the HP printer may be the smallest, I didn't like the noise and reliablity and so I think there are much better choices out there.

This printer was purchased to be shared among 4 co-workers. It was great until we "Needed" to replace the black cartridge after two months. A new HP cartridge was purchased and every thing worked fine for two weeks. Then the drum light came on. I thought it was a little soon for a new drum so I called HP support. They said that basically every time the black cartridge needs to be replaced the drum will also. That's $100 for the black and $200 for the drum. A drum was purchased and the printer seemed to work fine. Then the yellow cartridge went out. I thought this was very odd since color is not used very much. I did a little research on this printer and found out that you can replace the microchips on the drum and cartridges. I ordered them from e-bay. I installed them on the old drum unit and surprise, surprise it worked. Then installed one on the old black, and the old yellow, and you guessed it they still worked as well. They worked for two months until the black toner actually ran out and left streaks on the page.

Print quality overall is good, but the shaddy cartridge replacement, and noise will have me looking for a new laser next year.

I've always liked HP's printer quality. In fact, I've had several black and white HP laser printer in the past, and all have performed flawlessly for years and years. Recently, then, I decided to "upgrade" (yeah, that's a joke -- upgrade) to a color laser printer -- stop using the expensive ink jet I thought!

Well, we have two of these 2550n printers in the building here, and both have developed a similar problem after about 700 pages. Neither one will print anything but blank pages, and both develop some strange series of lights on the control panels. There doesn't seem to be any consistency in the light ups either. One time, the drum light might come on. Another time, all four toner lights will come on. A third time, we might get just two of the toner lights, and still another time, we might get the toner and drum lights on only this time they'll be blinking.

Unplug them and leave them unplugged for a few days, and you might get a green "go" light right after turning it on again. If you're really lucky, you might get a clean printout, but that's the only printout you're going to get until the printer has rested a few more days again.

Yeah, it's hard work being a color laser printer! Don't, I repeat, DON'T buy one of these printer -- not even used! They're bad, BAD news!!!!!

The printer puts out acceptable business output (nowhere near photo quality) but I am currently printing a graphic that ended up at 24mb to the printer and it has been 38 minutes processing over a USB 2.0 connection. When I send the same graphic to our 3500 color laser, it processes in about 18 seconds and prints in 30. HP tech support told me that this was acceptable for such a "large" file and perhaps I should reduce the file size. Since I'm printing full-page graphics and not postage stamps, I guess I'll look for a good inkjet...and certainly NOT an HP!

I am replacing this dud with another printer after less than 2 years. This was a major purchase for a school Art department with limited funds. The write ups sounded good and prints cheaper than the other printer I had in mind. The printer was to replace inkjets so we could network with a number of eMacs and make life easier. Hmmm.... I had to get an HP guy into make the thing work properly and that took calls around the world till I got someone to come in who lived near. He fiddled and fixed after a while but problems continued - he came in twice and it work sporadically for a year but would stop printing for no reason, print at odd times for no reason, pressing flashing buttons ?? why were they flashing - who knows? I 'd get full colour copies of the machine advertising using up pages of ink. This year has been all down hill I have wasted so much time on the machine and have very disappointed students. Good point : print quality is OK for the printer type.

A nice printer marred by a couple of annoying faults:

1. The supplied HP Toolbox software only works on Windows. If you are a MacOS X user you cannot configure most of the settings on this printer without using a PC despite all of the documentation that comes with the printer saying otherwise. HP makes no mention of the fact that there is no HP Toolbox software for MacOS X on their website.

2. It's noisy when starting up and printing. And to make matters worse, the printer will calibrate itself every 8 hours making even more noise. Despite what the manual says you cannot change this period so it will end up running in the middle of the night. So if you are sensitive to noise/and or sharing the room with this printer, then it might not be the printer for you.

Otherwise the print quality is decent enough. Don't expect photo quality with color prints and some color banding appears if you are using lower quality laser printer paper. Text however is crisp and clean.

If you can live with the above faults then take a look. Otherwise look elsewhere.

There are a lot of good review on this printer. After doing what i felt was adequate research i purchased the 2550n for the networking and inexpensive color printing. I wasnt wanting photo perfection just nice color printing.

The first machine i bought worked fine for about 40 pages and then the lower tray caused an "unexpected sheet size" error that would not resolve. I returned the item to Amazon and they quickly replaced the item. The second printer didnt work right out of the box. No printing other than the self diagnosis page saying "all was fine". I couldnt get it to work at all! How frustrating. I would not be lured by the seemingly apparent low cost of the printing, ive wasted so much time trying to get this thing to work.

I did a bunch of research before buying the HP 2550N, because this was my first color laser printer for my home and home business use. (I've had a LaserJet 6P monochrome laser for years that just keeps on chugging along, trouble-free, and costs very little for toners. But I finally sold that to a client who needed a cheap laser around that size, and figured I'd move up to color.)

I went with the HP 2550N primarily because I found one on eBay, new in the box, for under $400 - and I had basic requirements of a unit with good Mac OS X support and good networked printing support. I couldn't really beat the price and still get both of these things.

Unfortunately, when my 2550N arrived, the front paper tray appeared to be broken. I could hear a piece of plastic rattling around inside the printer, and it refused to pull any paper from the lower tray, whether the front tray was open or closed. My call to HP support didn't go well either. The first rep. I spoke with obviously was a foreigner with a thick accent (hard to understand). He tried to tell me my printer's warranty had already expired! I told him that was impossible, because I just purchased it and filled out the warranty registration on the HP web site. He told me to wait a few days and call back, because it takes a while for it to update in their system. (Huh? HP sells *computers* and their own warranty registration system is that slow??)

I called several days later, reaching another foreigner, who told me my warranty was indeed still in effect, but this time - he claimed it expired in only 3 or 4 more months. (What happened to the 1 year warranty??) Then he forwarded me to the first native English speaking person I encountered; a woman in their "customer care" division. She was relatively helpful, but ended up telling me my best option was to lug the printer over to a local repair shop that would do the repair work for me under warranty. (HP supposedly had this printer on backorder, so even if I sent it back to them directly for repair or replacement, it would take 2 weeks!)

I then called the repair shop, and they told me they wouldn't do the service work on it, because "if pieces are physically broken and rolling around loose in the unit, HP isn't going to actually cover that as warranty work and we'll get stuck not being compensated for our service on it." Great!

Thankfully, I finally ended up getting this resolved through the seller on eBay. But if you're stuck with no resource other than HP for service, good luck!

As for the relative noise of the printer - it does have a habit of occasionally "waking up" and going through a "chunka-chunka-chunka-ka-chunk" sound, which seems to be it rotating through the toners in the "carousel" inside of it. Can't figure out why that's necessary, unless HP does that to keep the toner from "clumping up" inside the cartridges or something? When actually printing, you get this same type of sound before the first page prints, but it seems to spit out remaining pages of a multi-page print job considerably faster than the first page. It certainly wouldn't be described as printing "quickly", but you also have to remember that unlike an inkjet, it "downloads" the whole page before printing it out in one swoop. I think some people get impatient watching the blinking green light on the printer and think it's slower printing than their inkjets. Though actually, the inkjets take just as long (or longer) to print a page of color graphics. They just "feel" faster because you see them drawing each line as the job progresses.

Print quality seems quite good to me. I came into this knowing it wasn't going to be optimal for such things as printing glossy photos for framing. That's why I still keep an Epson Stylus Photo inkjet printer around. But it excels at such tasks as printing out color brochures on card-stock paper or making one's own business cards.

I had a HPLaserJet 4M for over 10 years and I was so very happy with it that when I decided to get a color laser I also thought this one would be great. My complaints are basically that it is a very very very expensive printer to keep running. Color cartidges are about $70 each so I figure that I could throw the unit away and buy another for the cost of replacing all the cartriges. Also it is really slow even after the first page prints. Interestingly too it seems to run a cycle through check every once in a while like it is trying to reestablish its IP connection. The printer also likes to jam paper and this is really frustrating if you are trying to print out a 10 page document and it jams every other page. I don't recommend this printer regardless of price.