Reliable PS office printer, good colors
Written: Apr 05 '01
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Pros: Quality, user friendly, cost of consumables
Cons: Speed, noise, display of remaining lifetime of consumables
The Bottom Line: Very good as networked, office printer. Separate CMYK cartridges, effective management. Good drivers. Easy to use
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| sorinb's Full Review: Hewlett Packard Color LaserJet 4500 Printer |
Rather bulky but I guess this is the price you have to pay in order to have 4 separate toner cartridges. Also slow because of that (4 ppm full color).
Very reliable, it worked in our office for 1 year, printing more than 70,000 copies without problems.
Also, the PostScript support is nice but you have to use it with caution. During the installation there will be added 2 drivers (one for raster printing and one for PostScript). If you choose them wrong (for instance you try to print a bitmap with the PostScript driver) the rendering time can increase up to several minutes, depending on situation.
I don't like the fact that the remaining life of consumables (which are numerous, by the way: there are 4 toner cartridges CMYK, 1 fuser kit, 1 drum kit and 1 transfer kit) is not really measured but estimated from the number of pages printed.
Excellent printer drivers, as in all HP printers I have used before. I cannot underline how important this is as nobody seems to care about them. The quality of the drivers (the "brain" that optimizes the print parameters for you, in order to get the best of your printer) of HP printers was ALWAYS the best I've ever experienced.
Also, although each print consists of 4 different colours, the positioning precision of each relative to others is very good. You don't need to leave "bleeding" space to separate colours like for offset or inkjet printing.
The biggest drawback of this printer, in my opinion, is the paper trays capacity (around 150 in lower tray + 100 in the upper one). When you want to print many copies (like 1000 pages or more) you will quickly find that your printer needs to work for several hours. Very often you would like to print-and-forget, leave it over night but you cannot do that because the paper tray capacity only enables the printer to work by itself for 2 hours. Probably there is a option of an extra paper sheet feeder, I'm not sure. I can only advise you to buy this kind of accessory if you are planning long print jobs (hundreds of pages).
Recommended:
Yes
Amount Paid (US$): 2400
Operating System: Windows
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Epinions.com ID:
sorinb
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Reviews written: 6
Trusted by: 0 members
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