Customer Reviews

HP Color LaserJet 2600n Printer (Q6455A#ABA)

5 star:		(36)
4 star:		(33)
3 star:		(17)
2 star:		(10)
1 star:		(21)

 

 

I guess the way the printer is set up is to ASSUME that you are using the color cartridges on an average basis, regardless of whether they are actually being used or not. Thus, it estimates when the cartridges should run out and when that time comes, you are locked out of further printing until the cartridges are replaced even though they may be full of toner. However, reading through the User Guide, there appears to be a solution on using the Color Toner Cartridges beyond the "replacement" time.

Page 94 of the User Guide has the following instructions for those who would like to use the toner beyond their replacement time:

Configuration
Cartridge Out Override can only be enabled from the printer's control panel menu.
1. From the main menu, press (RIGHT ARROW) to System setup and press (SELECT).
2. Press (RIGHT ARROW) to Print quality and press (SELECT).
3. Press (RIGHT ARROW) to Replace supplies and press (SELECT).
4. Press (RIGHT ARROW) to Override out and press (SELECT).
5. Press (SELECT).
If Stop at out is selected, the printer will stop printing when a cartridge reaches the recommended replacement point. If Override out is selected, the printer will continue
printing when a cartridge reaches the recommended replacement point. The factory default setting is Stop at out.

The full story of the trials and tribulations of a hapless 2600N owner can be viewed at: http://www.epinions.com/content_196413001348

You know, on paper, the HP 2600n probably makes no sense - not much memory, one-pass engine (speeds for black and color are the same), expensive replacement cartridges, slow black-only speed, average looks, small & unimpressive LCD display.

But.... In the real world, this printer will surprise and even amaze you! If you print ANY color in your documents, this printer will leave it's competition in the dust in terms of performance. Color print-outs are fast and come out instantly - no warm-up, etc. The unusual design allows it to take up minimal space on your desk and provides easy paper retrieval and cartridge replacement. The simple display is incredibly intuitive and features are easily & quickly located.

Instead of lots of memory, the printer makes use of your computer's memory and cpu (read: not post-script) - this may have a very slight performance effect on your computer. But, you never have to worry about purchasing extra printer memory ($$), since your computer probably has plenty of it available and probably more CPU power than you need.

Operating noise is acceptable and the printer never over-heats (common on some other color laser models). The HP support software isn't the flashy kind that populates your tool bars - just a very simple and effective set of utilities, which helps you configure and maintain the printer.

Color text print quality is the best I've seen on any kind of printer, and business graphics are unrivaled. The photo printouts are pretty decent for a laser, but not in the class of inkjets - but they sure come out fast!

While the cartridges are expensive - at least the printer comes with FULL capacity cartridges, which ironically cost more than the printer. (You are literally getting the printer for free!). I have printed several large documents (including many hi-res pictures) and the cartridges are still showing 98% capacity!

So, when should you NOT get this printer? If you mainly print-out reams of black/white documents, then this printer is NOT a good choice; go for a monochrome or 4-pass color laser instead. But, most home users do print some color (ie, web pages) which makes this a much better real-world printer.

They have the more powerful one-pass engine type HP color lasers where I work, and they are impressive; which makes me believe the 2600n should be reliable as well.

I bought this printer in October, 2005, primarily to print documents with occasional color use. To my surprise, about 3/4 of the way through my second black toner cartridge, the three color cartridges were exhausted. The supply counter reported that I had printed 4800 pages in color! I print VERY LITTLE color, and I just could not understand it. I called HP tech support, and was told that in fact even when you think you are printing black text only, the printer uses "a little" color toner too. I was not happy to hear this, since nowhere in HP's literature that I could find is this mentioned, but OK. . .they told me I could prevent this by printing in "draft" instead of in "normal," and by printing in greyscale. So, I loaded the new color cartridges (THREE of them, at approx. $80 each!!!), and guess what? The page counter CONTINUED to count pages for each of the color cartridges AND for the black cartridges! So, I called tech support back and was THEN informed that there is no way to avoid "using" color (I don't know if the printer actually uses color, or if the counter just "says" it does. The end result is the same. You can't print in black if your color cartridges are "out.") Tech support called this a "cheap" printer and said that the grayscale option isn 't available, no matter what you try to set up. Needless to say, I feel pretty disgusted and cheated. I will use up the remaining toner and then throw this machine away. I think HP should be ashamed. The tech guy seemed to think I should have somehow "known" about this. Phoo! Don't buy it. M. Zashin
Addendum: To be fair, I called HP tech support a third time and was then told that tech support #2 was wrong. You CAN print in grayscale and by doing so will avoid "using" color toner. It is also important to download and install the latest firmware from the HP site. I am following these suggestions, and will suspend judgment until I find out if this is now accurate information. M. Zashin

Don't be fooled by the 600 x 600 resolution listed. The printer outputs fantastic quality photo prints and (obviously) great text. If you are considering this instead of an inkjet for photos, be warned that a laser printer will only output as good as the source material. Pics from my 5MP Kodak EasyShare camera look beter than on my (also HQ) HP inkjet. But older lower res (3mp) photos exhibit color inaccuracies. In short, if your photo has a flaw, the 2600n will show it (Laser Printers don't hide flaws by "bleeding" like inkjets do). Laser printers also aren't for novices, you *will* have to play around with the driver menus to get optimal quality and speed- but when you do, you should be quite satisfied.

see update at end of review

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I have had my HP color Laserjet 2600n for about one year. I also have a regular HP monochrome laserjet for the bulk of my printing needs (faster & auto-duplex & lower toner cost), and an Epson color inkjet for printing better quality photos. I use the 2600n for two reasons: color webpage printing and printing the tray inserts for CDs that I produce in my recording studio (I use a special robotic inkjet printer for printing on the CDs themselves, no adhesive labels here!)

I went into this purchase with some trepidation, because the cost of replacing all 4 tomer cartridges exceeds the cost of the whole printer. I initially figured that I might just buy a new one every time the toner ran out, and donate the toner-less printer carcass to schools, etc. Well, nobody wants these as donations, because they would still need to shell out more money for toner than it would cost to buy a new machine WITH toner. I should add, however, that HP claims and independent labs have shown that the toner cartridges that come with this printer are as full as the ones you would buy later - they are NOT half full. It seems to be true that HP is giving the printer away in order to sell toner later on.

I have had nothing but good luck with the 2600n so far. I have not experienced paper feed issues, and the only print quality problem I have seen is when I try to print large areas of a single color; this printer, like most (if not all) laser printers, does a poor job of producing large areas of single color coverage. You get an unevenly printed area when you try. But one rarely has to print such things.

All 4 toner cartridges have been depleting at about the same rate, and are almost ready for replacement. I decided that, since the printer is inexpensive, I would experiment with toner replacement kits. I bought a well-reviewed kit on eBay for $135, including the four bottles of toner, refilling tools and supplies, and a set of new fuseable 'chips' that tell the printer that the cartridges are new after being refilled. If this does not work well for me, I have already purchased a set of new cartridges. The online information I have seen says that the cartridges have internal components that wear out, and one cannot expect them to hold up for more than their original lifespan plus one subsequent refill. So, whether the toner refills work well or not, I have the NEXT toner change already waiting in the closet.

Some reviewers have mentioned that the 2600n does not handle or print well on card stock or heavier papers. The printer does things differently depending on settings you can make in the driver configuration. If I am printing to heavy paper or card stock, I do get poor results if I forget to tell the driver about it ahead of time. With the 'heavy' paper setting, the printer is much slower; I assume that it is keeping the paper in the fuser stage for a longer time to heat the paper more thoroughly, the better to fuse the toner to the paper. This may also inprove print quality and paper handling as well, but I noticed that with heavy paper, unless I use the correct setting, the toner is not well attached to the paper and can rub or fall off.

(Epson told me, regarding my color inkjet printer, that when I change the paper thickness setting there, that it not only changes how much ink is sprayed, but the paper handling pick-up roller accelerations are adjusted to compensate for the different paper handling characteristics. I imagine that this may also be the case with paper handling on the 2600n....this is why I suggest you read the manual and/or study the driver's settings - you might be using the wrong ones and getting poor results).

Overall, I think what HP has provided a good quality, easy to use machine that allows entry level color laser printing. As with any office equipment, you can pay more initially to get lower operating costs. If you don't do a ton of color printing, the 2600n is a pretty good balance between initial afforability and subsequent operating costs. Even if you just bought a new one once a year, you would be getting a pretty good deal. think of it as an installment plan or an annual rent, where you expect to pay $350 each year to have color laser printing available.

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Update, November 2007

The toner refill kit that I mentioned earlier finally came into use recently. The printer had been chugging along for months after the point when its toner cartridge meters read 'empty', but finally the black became truly depleted and I got an error message, "You must replace black toner before proceeding to print". So, I opened that $135 box from Ink Owl, and followed the directions to refill the black cartridge. This included making holes in the cartridge's 'waste toner' bin and removing that excess toner, then plugging the holes, making another hole to fill the 'fresh toner' bin, and finally replacing the 'chip'. By the way, I learned two things doing this:

- you never want to change black toner in a room with white walls, even with lots of extra care to prevent mess...the toner makes a cloud that settles on everything, and is very noticeable on while walls.
- the 'chip' really is a circuit with tiny integrated circuit and surface mount components...it is not just a fuse as some other printers use.

Anyway, the refill worked, but I was not happy with the results. Immediately, the printer started laying down a light gray shadow over the entire page, very visible on white (unprinted) areas, and anything that was supposed to be pure black was now dark gray instead. Also, the new black toner seemed to disagree with the other color toners, as the particles seemed to repel each other. Being concerned that the refilled cartridge might be hosing the printer or the other cartridges, I replaced the refilled one with a factory fresh black one, and print quality returned to normal. Based on this experience, I do NOT recommend refilling the cartridges for this printer.

The printer itself is great. very high quality and reasonably quick.

My only qualm is the cost of replacement cartridges. While all printer ink seems way over priced, HP has taken it to a new extreme. You can actually replace the ENTIRE 2600N for LESS than it will cost you to replace the 4 toner cartridges. Something is seriously wrong with this picture both from a cost and an environmental perspective.

Purchased this for only $250 new after special promotional discount at the local office supply superstore. Set up was a breeze, plugged it into our home network via Ethernet into our home router, worked perfectly from the beginning. Very nice output, love the networked feature that let us print from any computer anywhere in the house.(2 desktop G4 towers, 1 iBook, 1 Toshiba laptop). The toner cartridge access is a particularly elegant design in comparison to the prior generation HP SOHO printers.

Replaced/supplemented HP 2610 AiO that used a ridiculous amount of way over-priced ink.

Only real drawback is that this is a relatively slow printer. It takes just as long to print an all BW doc as color. It fast output is important, look elsewhere. As for toner, at this point the depletion rate seems quite slow, and for the price I paid, I could just as well wait for another deal and simply buy a new one for less than the cost of replacing all of the carts in this printer. (It comes with FULL carts, not the silly partials in some printers.) Ridiculous in a green sense, but sadly true.

I had been looking at the previous generation 2550N until this newest printer came on the market. As it happens, my wife's office installed the 2550N in her Windows only LAN. The thing has been a engineering and design disaster from the word go with toner problems, network access problems, and just last week, total failure of the network card. And this in a corporate office with a full IT staff and LAN administrators. I keep looking at our completely satisfactory 2600 and knocking on wood.

Only one other wish - automatic duplexing. The manual duplexing works well enough, but automatic would be wonderful.

I love the speed, print quality, and network and Macintosh friendliness of this printer. The colors are vivid, and the blacks are blacker than any of the dozen laser printers I've used previously. The footprint is amazingly small for a color laser, and the mechanics are much simplified from its predecessor, the 2550N.

I love this printer so much, in fact, that I didn't hesitate to buy a second one when the first shredded its transfer belt after only a few hundred pages. (I searched the web, and this seemed to be a fluke.) You can't replace the transfer belt, but when you can buy a whole new printer for less money than the 4 included toner cartridges would cost separately, the print engine is essentially a "free" disposable. (With $600 invested in toner cartridges, however, I bought the extended warranty on the second unit, just in case the pricing geniuses at HP sober up...)

A few problems:

The "manual" input is nearly useless. If I don't empty the regular paper tray first, the printer inevitably feeds a sheet from there, too, on "top" of the stock I am trying to feed manually. It also may require a little interaction with the front panel to confirm that, yes, I really do want to use the manual input tray I specified when I issued the print command on my computer. It's easier to put special stock on top of the regular stock in the tray, and use that.

It's a small hassle to load envelopes (no more than 5, I think), and they shimmy during feeding in a way that does not inspire confidence. I had been planning to retire my Epson 980ne inkjet, but now I use it exclusively as my envelope printer (for which it's a speed champ); a good complement for this weak spot of the 2600N.

As a thrifty person, I enabled the "cartridge out override" as described in the Amazon review titled "Cartridge problems can be overcome". Before doing so, the printer refused to print more than 2114 pages with the black cartridge, even though it had plenty of toner left. The first symptom of actually running out of toner was a smeary light gray band running down the page, which happened at 2395 pages in my case. Replacing the black cartridge cleared up the printout instantly, as I expected. My pages typically use much less color so I haven't replaced any of those cartridges yet. Although the printer says I've printed 1221 pages that used color, it has increased its estimate of remaining pages in the color cartridges to 2079. That would be nice! (but the estimate must be quite crude)

If you don't enable "cartridge out override", you face the irritation of perhaps avoiding jobs that don't use much toner, or troubling to declare many jobs to be grayscale, because you hate to pay 15 cents per page (for 4 colors of toner) when typical pages don't have much color or toner on them. If you do use the "cartridge out override", of course, you only have to buy new cartridges when you actually use up the toner in each.

The fuser is a little hotter than in my Apple LaserWriter, and it sealed some of the envelopes I printed with it! Purchasing different envelopes solved that problem (as suggested in the manual).

The print dialog has a lot of fine-tuning options for color. Most people will never need them, but I like having them. Benefiting from them does require a certain amount of special knowledge or experimentation, however.

I recommend this printer to all my friends, despite the hassle of its telling you to buy new cartridges even when they are not empty.

Overall, the printer is simple and easy to use. Text looks great, and photos are acceptable. The printer has a lot of trouble with standard cardstock, though.

One bonus is that this printer ships with full toner cartridges, not "starter cartridges." This could save you a few hundred dollars in the long term.


SPEED
While it can't keep up with most business lasers, it's more than fast enough for home or small business use. It also has very little warm-up time, which is great for home users.


EASE OF USE
The printer is very easy to set up. Both the menus on the printer LCD and in the driver are simple and easy to use. On the other hand, the networking feature is mostly undocumented, with no wizards or setup guides.


TEXT QUALITY
Text is clear and sharp, what you'd expect from a laser printer. Color text looks good too, as long as it is fairly saturated. Some light colors like baby blue or pink show the pattern of dots too clearly.

If you use laser foil (for shiny gold lettering on certificates and such), you'll be pleased to know that the foil sticks to color toner about as well as it does to black toner. This lets you use a toner color similar to the foil color.


PHOTO QUALITY
This is a decent printer, but not photo quality. One coworker remarked that photos printed on my 2600N looked like "1970s magazine prints." Another mistook a printed photo for a print of a painting. Unfortunately, the low resolution leads to color flattening and visible dot patterns.

On the other hand, the printer works wonderfully for my wife's anime-style art.


NOT FOR CARDSTOCK
I've never had a problem with standard paper. It prints fine every time.

On the other hand, the printer has a lot of trouble with standard cardstock. When my wife needs to print a run of 20 or thirty cards, we have to baby-sit the printer because about every third piece of cardstock jams. Luckily, the jams are in the paper tray, and are very easy to pull out.

Additionally, prints on cardstock often have color registration problems, and sometimes even smears of toner.

Bought this printer based on reviews I had read. Although some reviews were slightly negative , on the whole the bulk were glowing, and after having had mine for 3 months now I have to concur.

For the price , I am very pleased with the print quality. Not top end quality, but certainly very good. If you wanted absouloutely pristine, razor sharp print quality, then this isn't the prniter for you. But then again, you would be paying 3 times the price for that.

Speed is more than good enough for home office use. But again, if you were after a fast , high throughput printer, you should be spending more money and going for one built for speed.

Set-up was literally 5 minutes. Have not yet had to replace the cartridges (but then I am not a high volume printer), but would investigate the costs for this if you are (then again , if you are, see my earlier note about high throughput...)

In summary , for personal or home office use and for the price, I really don't think you can find a better printer. I researched most of the printers within this price range and relied heavily on user reviews. If you are doing the same, add my vote to the yays.


John McGeechan.