HP 2550l Colour Laser 

It is 48x45x33cm when closed, one way cost savings have been made is to not include a conventional paper tray in the base configuration so you need to add another 23cm to the depth for the fold out paper holder in front of the unit. This I found rather disappointing as I was not happy with more than 50 sheets loaded. Paper is delivered face down on the top of the unit. It will either need to sit on the floor or on a very strong unit as it weights around 22kilos.

I always go on about how lasers always deliver the stated print speeds well sorry to say while I was perfectly happy with the output quality print speeds were not as stated, the unit wanted to check itself out between every 4 to 6 pages so while the printer was printing it was producing at a good rate but it spent quite a lot of time doing nout.

Really long print runs – even in monochrome – would not be possible as the paper holder would need continual filling. It is stated to hold 125 sheets, certainly I would not like anything like that in it.

Stated speed is up to 19PPM and 4PPM in colour. I did achieve simple colour pages at 4PPM but while I could get a speed of 4 pages printed in 15 seconds in mono the 20 second gap before it printed the next page made an accurate page count meaningless.

The supplied 64MB of memory is nearly always enough to print an A4 page graphic, certainly enough to print three 10x15cm images on an A4 page but occasionally not enough to print four 13x9cm on a A4 page when there is a lot of detail in them. Memory can be expanded using a standard 100pin SDRAM module to 128 or 192MB.

Recently I have not reviewed a lot of colour lasers but this unit –even with it’s shortcomings – seems good value to me. Certainly ideal for someone wanting a short run newsletter or someone like an estate agent needing to produce good quality colour images in with textual details.

Colour images look good even on standard ‘plain paper’ and while an A4 image takes around 70seconds to print, further copies of the same image print in around 40 seconds. The work involved in printing multiple images on a single sheet make them somewhat slower but still quicker than an inkjet and while inkjet images printed on special photo paper normally would look better the laser produced good lifelike printouts onto plain paper.

Installation is reasonably quick and took up around 300MB of hard disc space. The unit has both USB and parallel connectors. HP’s Laserjet toolbox is a handy little tool that is supplied and installed when you run the driver installation, it has a lot of useful information for both the novice and expect user. www.dabs.com have the HP 2550l for £258.26

http://h10010.www1.hp.com/wwpc/uk/en/ho/WF25a/5043-5047-5051-5051-5063-4846693.html