Wow can this really be on my desk?
Written: Aug 18 '00 (Updated Oct 12 '00)
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Pros: Cheap maintenance and toner, inexpensive buy-in, very hardy and fast
Cons: too big for the home desktop, loud and noisy, draws a lot of power
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| dada21's Full Review: Hewlett Packard Color LaserJet 4500 Printer |
I am amazed. I've been at the forefront of color printer technology for years. I've watched printers come down from $100,000 models that cost $30 a sheet to where we are now: The Hewlett Packard Color LaserJet 4500, which costs about $2500, and around 10 cents a sheet.
I have one on my desk in my home office. This printer can support built in ethernet networking, it can accept a duplexer [print on both sides without intervention], and a ton of memory. Postscript out of the box. Color Consistency out of the box. On site warranty.
My first print job out of the printer was A SCARY EXPERIENCE. I opened a fairly complex job up [vector and bitmap] in Color Draw 9, and printed it, then left to make some coffee. I came back 3 minutes later, and waited, and waited, and waited, and waited. After 20 minutes, I got pretty frustrated, so I printed again, and boom, a minute later the job popped out. When I went to grab it, I noticed there were 2 copies of it. Which means that the first print copy came out while I was making coffee. I laughed for about 10 minutes in joy.
The printer has held up to a LOT of abuse. Cat hairs, horrible temperature variances, bad paper handling, moisture and dryness, not the greatest power quality in the world, but its stayed true for the past few months. Colors are still superb, text quality is nothing short of amazing at 600dpi, and the speed is good, except for large bitmaps, which require a LOT more than the 64MB that came with the machine.
If you need permanent, high quality, fast color output, look no further. Toner costs are low, drum and other assembly costs are low, and maintenance is ridiculously easy and cheap. Bye bye ink-jet!
UPDATE 10/12/00:
Definitely download the latest drivers for this printer. The newest HP Postscript drivers are nothing short of AMAZING. The colors between my monitor and the printer are EXACT, I've never seen anything so perfect. HP uses the "new" sRGB color management system, so what you see IS what you get. Also, print speed is greatly enhanced for some reason [the postscript output is actually smaller by a small bit] and the driver is much more sturdy, I haven't had a crash yet.
The printer has been running for over 6 months now, and its perfect. I run it all day and night sometimes, I just did a run of 1200 HEAVY [110lb] card stock sheets, double sided, and it didn't choke once, except for a paper jam or two that was my fault [don't overload the manual paper tray].
Hopefully I'll be able to sell this beast to someone used and pick up the 8500, which is HP's identical yet 11x17" printer. Details to come!
Recommended:
Yes
Amount Paid (US$): 3000
Operating System: Windows and Macintosh
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Epinions.com ID:
dada21
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Location: Illinois
Reviews written: 21
Trusted by: 0 members
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