HP’s Colour LaserJet CP2025n colour laser printer joins an increasingly crowded field of low-cost models for small and home offices. All of them have tradeoffs, but this model has fewer than most. And what it loses in style points, it makes up for in results.
The squat, round-cornered CP2025n offered middling speed but impressive print quality in our tests. HP carefully claims an engine speed of “up to 21 ppm” (pages per minute). The printer came reasonably close, hitting 17.5 ppm when printing plain text. Its graphics speed of 4.2 ppm is pretty good compared with the competition. And the results were generally quite nice: very crisp, black text; fairly natural colours (sometimes tending toward yellow or cyan); and haziness just in some of the finer details, like pinstripes and delicate flowers. Only grayscale photos stymied it, with prints looking greenish, dark, and grainy.
While the printer’s performance should please most people, its design and configuration may not. The control panel–a two-line, monochrome LCD and adjacent navigation buttons–is simple. Its 250-sheet input tray and 150-sheet output tray are adequate; it also has a 50-sheet multipurpose tray. Manual duplexing with prompts is available; you reload sheets into the multipurpose tray, which is unusual but not inconvenient. A second, 250-sheet input costs US$180. But overall, the parts feel cheap or awkward. Paper-tray markings are minimal. Moveable parts tend to jiggle, wiggle, or rattle. If you extend the input tray to accommodate legal-size media, it sticks out awkwardly.
While some low-cost printers hit you with high toner costs, the Colour LaserJet CP2025n commendably restrains itself. The machine ships with starter-size, 1200-page supplies for black (K), cyan (C), magenta (M), and yellow (Y). A 3500-page black cartridge costs $116, or about 3.3 cents per page, while each 2800-page colour cartridge costs $114, or about 4 cents per colour, resulting in a four-colour page cost of about 15.3 cents. These prices are far better than those you’ll find from laser printers that cost less up front, including the Dell 2130cn and the Lexmark C543dn. HP offers some nice hand-holding with the printer. The CD-based setup process includes simple animations; there’s even a video showing you how to customize the colour quality. A utility called HP ToolBoxFX shows network status and offers troubleshooting help. Only the user guide–in HTML–disappointed me: it’s light on illustrations, and it offers little useful information on the driver features.
If your budget restricts you to a lower-cost colour laser, HP’s Colour LaserJet CP2025n is one of the best choices currently available. While you lose some robustness, you get plenty of good print quality.
