Customer Reviews

HP Color LaserJet 5550DN Printer

5 star:		(1)
4 star:		(2)
3 star:		(0)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(1)

 

 

We have been using this at our office as a netwrok printer for a year and a half. Mostly for documents, charts and company resumes.

Pros:
-The color laser printout of images is very good even on a regular copy paper. You get better results using bright white photo paper. We have not to try it on a glossy paper yet but it can. But just don't compare it with an inkjet yet.
-Printing color images even for a full page is amazingly fast. Approximately mere 5 seconds per full color page.
-Compare to an inkjet, laser printers are much economical on ink. Inkjets are notorious for selling you the unit almost at a giveaway price and then selling a full set of replacement ink for the same price as the printer itself.
-Multiplatform. Windows and Mac
-Duplex printing.
-It can print up to 11 x 17 paper.
-The warm up time, around 15 secs is decent
-The spec claims a duty cycle of 120,000 pages per month. We are printing around 5000 pages a month.

Rooms for improvement:
- Speed can be improve on the black and white printouts.
- Can be made smaller. 28W x 25H x 23D is a huge footprint .
- Price can go lower.

This is certifiably the worse nightmare product I have ever bought. After paying $4000 for it 5 years ago, the printer began to have multiple print quality problems within the first year and half. From that point on it was one maddening experience with HP [lack of] support after another. We had to pay $30 at one point to get the quality pay-per-tech-service they required us to use; the guy freaking read the website trouble shooting guide to me while I screamed at him over the phone. We took the machine in to a certified repair technician and ended up replacing the fuser, image transfer kit, and all four toner cartridges even though they all showed more than 33% life left. Some problems were fixed but others not (it can't seem to print the same exact shade of tan across an entire page for instance, and there are intermittent black streaks that pop up.) We actually had to replace the transfer kit again after only 1 year and almost no use because it created large stripes of color along both ends of every print.

HP told us that the color toner cartridges only have a life span of two years whether they are used or not and the fuser and image transfer kit are only under warrantee for six months after installation. That directly conflicts with what is printed on their website and on the materials that come with the parts.

To sum up, we have spent over $6000 on a printer that only worked properly for 18 months (a couple thousand printed pages) and we have spent well over 12 hours of constant time on the phone with HP being treated like crap. In the most recent call I just wanted to buy the new transfer kit but the woman forced me to listen to pitch after pitch ranging from why not buy some paper to (if you can believe it) why not buy a new printer since this one is so old! I told her I wasn't very likely to ever buy anything from HP ever again. I earnestly recommend that you never buy anything from them either!

To think I could've just printed my color prints at kinkos trouble free for about 1/3 the cost of what I've spent on this nightmare.

Fast easy assembly, great short warm-up and speed in printing both color and black & white. Came out of the box and was up and running in less than 1/2 hour. Highly recommend this to any small business particularly if you have need to network both mac's and pc's and need both 8 1/2 X 11 and 11/17 output.

I support six of these units.

Overall, they perform pretty well.

Depending on how intense your usage is, you might require some add on parts such as:
- more RAM
- external hard drive to help with job storage and collating
- IF you THINK you might need the duplexing capability, purchase the printer that INCLUDES it.
(buying the duplex unit later will cost over $100 more, to buy as as add on device)

Pros:

- can do most paper sizes, including 11 x 17
- service manuals readily available
- maint parts readily available
- add ons readily available
- with more vendors in the marketplace, you can buy parts cheaper than if you had to deal directly with a single source parts vendor.
- Service: if you buy the service manuals online and someone in your office has some technical abilities, you can most likely fix almost any problem that might arise. The HP service manuals have pretty well documented trouble shooting flowcharts, error code definitions, etc.

Cons:

- replacement parts can be expensive for small offices, if they were not planned/budgeted for.

Notes:

- if you are a high usage shop, someone should be assigned to provide scheduled maint.
- parts like the fuser assembly and transfer unit should be planned for. Keep one of each on hand if you are getting close to the scheduled maint time frame.
- purchase the HP service manual and keep it handy. It can help you solve most any technical issue.