Color & Monochrome Lasers

Continued from page: 2

Tuesday, September 26, 2006

Mid Range Color Lasers

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Mid Range Color Lasers
As these printers could not be clubbed into any of the other categories, due to a wide variation in their price, they've not been ranked, but reviewed separately nevertheless

HP LaserJet 3000dn

Price: Rs 94,000 (1 yr warranty) Contact: HP India, Gurgaon  PH: 2566111  Email ID: kakuni.mahto@hp.com

+ Low cost per page, fast print speed – Costly

This is the fastest color laser printer we received and the most expensive one in this category. The printer is meant for workgroups with up to 50 users. It comes with default 256 MB RAM that can be expanded to 512 MB. However, this upgrade can cost you about Rs 31K. It has an LCD panel with navigational buttons. Plus, it has a useful Jam Recovery option that ejects the jammed sheet, without requiring any opening of the unit. The 3000dn has a rated ppm of 30 in mono and up to 15 ppm in color. It can do 600x600 dpi in both mono and color modes. For connectivity, you have two options: USB 2.0 and Ethernet. The printer has HP JetDirect embedded print server for managing print jobs.

The HP printers we have seen so far, have been quite noisy. The 3000dn is a lot quieter in comparison. This printer is a clear winner in terms of speed. It achieved a perfect 30 ppm as rated, while printing text with a color image. On printing a full color image it took around 33 secs to print. As far as quality is concerned, line art as well as full color and CMY graphic prints were very good. The printer gives you very economical color prints (about Rs 3.12 per print) in this category. And in mono, the cost per page was only 52p, which also very low and affordable.

Bottom Line: Good print speed coupled with low printing cost make this an excellent choice.

HP LaserJet 3600dn

Price: Rs 65,000 (1 yr warranty) Contact: HP India, Gurgaon  PH: 2566111  Email ID: kakuni.mahto@hp.com

+ Good print quality  – Lower print speed, RAM can't be upgraded

This printer is meant for those workgroups that need good quality color prints. Unfortunately, this printer also comes with 128 MB RAM that cannot be upgraded. Just like the HP 3000dn, it has an LCD panel, but here you would be shown the name of the job it is processing. You can connect the printer over USB or Ethernet and printing jobs can be managed using its built-in print server. The printer gave us 17 ppm as rated for both color and mono prints. It can print at 600x600 dpi and the print quality was excellent with color as well as mono. In the line art test, the lines were slightly dotted instead of being solid, but to an acceptable extent. Surprisingly, full color graphics took only 22 secs, which is
11 secs lesser than its cousin, the HP 3000dn.

This printer gives the same speeds over both USB as well as Ethernet interfaces. The HP 3600dn costs Rs 65,000 and the cost per page with this printer was Rs 4.33 for color and just 97p with mono. But compared to HP 3000dn, the cost per page for 3600dn is higher.

Bottom Line: Overall, a good printer for small workgroups.

Next Page : Personal Mono Lasers

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