SMB IT | Curtis Franklin » REVIEW: HP Color LaserJet 1600 Great for SBs

March 27, 2007 | Comments: (0)

REVIEW: HP Color LaserJet 1600 Great for SBs

TAGS: SMB Hardware

I hate it when I'm the last to know. Must be pathological. But when HP shipped us the Color LaserJet 3800dn and then agreed to leave it with us for a long-termer (review on that soon), I had some fun strutting around and talking about the 20ppm color laser I had setup in my home office.

Then last weekend I'm over at a friend's house and he prints out Google directions in color. Being a nerd, I notice it's not an inkjet print, but a laser. Naturally, I inquire. Seems he just bought a new color laser from HP. Win lotto, I ask. Nope, he says, it cost $300.

That gets me giggling, 'cause a color laser at that money has to suck...somehow. So I check it out. Turns out it's the HP Color LaserJet 1600. First off it's smaller than my 3800dn, but that's actually a bonus in a small office setting. It's rated for 8ppm in either color or B&W--which is definitely slower than the 3800dn, but not enough to make me look down on it for the money.

It's USB-only, which I started to giggle about, but then he showed me where he'd plugged it into his WD NetCenter (his actually WORKS) shared hard disk. Those things (similar to the Iomega StorCenters) have USB ports in the chassis specifically designed to make them print servers. His was sharing the 1600 across his 8-box home network, no trouble.

Then he printed a few pics for me, and it just got worse. I'm no print quality aficionado, but his color print quality looked darn good to me. Certainly as decent as anything I'd recently run off my 3800dn. Hey, I'm sure Xerox' Phaser 8560 is a sexy machine for higher-end office use; but if you're looking to get really nice color print quality into a small office environment, the HP Color LaserJet 1600 is definitely worth a look. Just make sure you've got a print server sitting somewhere.

Color LaserJet 1600
Hewlett-Packard
List price: $299.99 Froogle Search
Pros: Way cheap, great print quality, good size
Cons: USB-only, 8ppm

Posted by Oliver Rist on March 27, 2007 06:00 PM

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