HP Color LaserJet 3500 ( Q1319A#ABA )

by HP

Product Details

• Item Weight: 40 pounds
• Shipping Weight: 98 pounds
• Shipping: Currently, item can be shipped only within the U.S. and to APO/FPO addresses. For APO/FPO shipments, please check with the manufacturer regarding warranty and support issues.
• ASIN: B0001AUB2Q
• Item model number: Q1319A#ABA
• Average Customer Review: 3.2 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (4 customer reviews)
• Date first available at Amazon.com: January 9, 2004

Product Description

Bring color into your business with the HP color LaserJet 3500 printer. Get professional color results at the same speed, ease and affordability you expect with black and white printing. Print vibrant color images and sharp black text at up to 12 pages per minute. HP's ImageREt 2400 color layering technology provides 2400 dpi color laser class quality through a multi-level printing process that controls color by combining up to four colors within a single dot and by varying the amount of toner in a given area. ImageREt 2400, together with the 600 x 600 engine resolution, creates millions of smooth colors, sharp images, and crisp text. The printer's instant-on fuser virtually eliminates warm-up time, so there is no performance penalty for allowing your printer to enter Powersave mode. And, HP's optimal-yield print cartridges deliver on-going savings.

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

13 of 13 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars BIG, Fast and Quiet, June 10, 2004

By 

Ogi (Newark, CA United States) - See all my reviews

This review is from: HP Color LaserJet 3500 ( Q1319A#ABA ) (Office Product)

Pros:
- Easy to install.
- Print quality is excellent.
- Fast and quiet for an economy color laser.
- Prints excellent color photos much cheaper than inkjet.

Cons:
- Be ready for size shock, it's big.
- Not very fast for Black and White

7 of 7 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars The best color laser printer under $1000 for Mac or Windows users, July 10, 2005

By 

tropic_of_criticism - See all my reviews

This review is from: HP Color LaserJet 3500 ( Q1319A#ABA ) (Office Product)

I have a network of four permanent computers, and several itinerant ones. These computers have included every iteration of Windows from 98 to XP Pro SP2, as well as OS X.3 and X.4.

This printer performs flawlessly with all of them, and has only been made more accessible through Apple's handy Bonjour software.

The color is startlingly good, and the speed is certainly more than the average home user would need, and enough for all but the highest-volume of business users. The flexibility of the on-board software allows you to control everything from print margins to paper size to color options from the printer itself, bypassing any settings you might have made in whatever program you're printing from.

USB 2.0 connections allow for very fast delivery of complex artwork--but this feature can be easily overrated. Depending on your network setup you may or may not be able to actually achieve this speed, through no fault of the printer's.

It does have a tendency to give a false jam signal when using some kinds of card stock. Genuine jams are rare, but when they occur, they are typically easy to clear--as long as you have relatively easy access to the rear of the machine. Though most jams can be cleared by opening up the front hood, some require you to retrieve the wayward paper via a back panel. Because of the printer's sheer bulk, I would think most users would tend to orient the printer with its back up against a wall. This makes good sense during normal operation, but if you can't conveniently turn the printer around, you may find it very, very frustrating to clear some jams--just because the thing is awfully heavy. Fortunately, in normal use with standard letter and legal sizes of paper, it hasn't jammed on me in the year I've owned it.

HP has done a better job with the manual tray on this unit than with their consumer B/W models (like, say, the 3330). I typically use this tray when feeding business cards, labels, and other paper where precise registration is necessary. On the lower-end models, manually fed labels, in particular, seem to feed in slightly unevenly. This wastes relatively expensive label paper by printing outside the margins of the individual labels. With the 3500, such mis-registration is much less common--though, annoyingly, it still happens about 1 out of every 10 or 15 attempts.

Cartridge life is blissfully long--even, surprisingly, with the black cartridge. In my experience, HP's page-count estimates are accurate, and maybe even conservative. For my money, the HP cartridges alone are reason enough to buy this printer. HP cartridges are very clean, very long-lived, and HP's responsible attitude toward recycling (allowing for free FedEx pickup of used cartridges) more than makes up for the fact that they are relatively expensive on the front end.

While we're talking about ink, it's useful to note that those deciding between ink jet and laser color printers should note that laser printers provide PERMANENT color, whereas ink jet smudges at the merest hint of rain. I have literally taken full color pages on heavy cardstock, left them in water overnight, and come back the next day to find the design completely intact. While this a feature of the laserjet technology, and not this particular model, now that the 3500 has come down to approximately the price of a high-end inkjet, it's easier to justify going to laser color.

To me, the only real decision one has to make with the 3XXX color line is which one to buy. If you already owned a print server, or you wanted to get a specific one, then the 3500 is the one you want. If, however, you don't have a print server, you may want to consider the 3500N. More recent additions to this line, like the 3550 and 3700, I don't think give the casual color printer enough to justify the increased price, but you will want to at least look at them before making a final decision.

3 of 3 people found the following review helpful:

2.0 out of 5 stars Badly underpowered host based system....., December 31, 2005

By 

Joseph Burnstein "Analyst" (Calgary, AB, Canada) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: HP Color LaserJet 3500 ( Q1319A#ABA ) (Office Product)

Badly underpowered host based system.....

This printer just looks mighty from the outside. The reality is that it has a host based architecture meaning that it relies on your PC for almost all image processing needs. Even the memory amount 64MB which might seem impressive for an average naïve buyer in reality is useless because the image rasterizing is done in your PC and not in the printer.

One typical consequence of this poor architecture is that it can NOT process multi-page PDFs with heavy graphics. The spooling process will attempt to create huge spool files into 2-3GB size but eventually will fail with error being printed out or the printer will simply fail the print job by printing only part of the page and then stop. HP has acknowledged this problem and admitted that only starting with the 4600 series the architecture is different and capable of handling graphics and multi-page image files.

The printer has a decent output quality and is fast if you need to print multiple copies of the same page. The real toner capacity is ~~1400-1600 pages for printouts involving colourful images and graphics.

For comparison Lexmark C510 easily handles the same PDF files without any glitches. The problem with C510 is that it CAN NOT print on a glossy paper. Attempting to do so leads to a mess with black toner falling off the printouts and getting inside the printer and soiling other pages. This pattern is consistent and happens even with replacement printers despite of Lexmark's customer service assurances. Also, they have hiked their toner prices to astronomical levels.