Hp Color Laserjet 2600n Printer
by Ben Turner on November 1, 2011
We have not seen a printer quite like HP’s 2600N before. It costs comparable as other entry-level color lasers, however it has a network interface and LCD user interface as standard.
This color laser printer doesn’t use the four-pass technology we’d expect with this price, either. Both color and mono pages are created in one pass, though at the rate of just eight per minute. In mono, this will make the 2600N the slowest laser we have seen for some time. Including the most basic black-only printers can manage 12ppm, and entry-level colour devices normally reach 18ppm or higher. HP’s unusual approach is designed to deliver prints at high speeds, however. Here the 2600N keeps speed with the very fastest four-pass lasers.
The 2600N seems to be an easy printer to live with, needing little more desk space compared to mono Samsung laser reviewed opposite. It successfully leased an IP address on our Labs network, and HP’s setup program found and configured it without incident. Paper needs a straight path to a 125-sheet output tray in the 250-sheet input cassette or manual feed. There isn’t any rotating carousel, either, so it’s exceptionally quiet while it’s printing.
Eight ppm seems remarkably slow these days. Our 50-page mono tests each took nearly six and a half minutes, sauntering in to the 2600N’s output tray at 7.8ppm. In color, the more spool times for the complex 24-page document reduced the 2600N to just 6.2ppm, but this is still ahead of its best entry-level competitors.
The HP’s print quality is fine, with excellent mono text. Its vibrant color output is suited to business presentations, but our test
photographs were grainy with inaccurate colours. Not one of the color settings cured this or could stop a couple of images being printed with curious imperfections.
The 2600N uses new consumables that weren’t widely available even as went to press. HP was excited to stress that the guide figures hadn’t yet been completed, but using them we calculated that pages should cost 2.3p in mono or 9.5p in color. This is a little above the competition, but we’d expect to see both prices fall in time.
Because of the 2600N’s slow mono printing speeds, most users might want to pay more for a network-ready four-pass competitor. Still, this laser is very good value if you need a fast and robust color printer for any small company network.

















