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The fact that the printer starts printing within 8 seconds after turning it on is a tremendous feature. What lured me to the machine was its ability to print on index card stock (for recipes) and the fact that HPs come with full toner cartridges. I know all toner cartridges are outrageously priced, so I figure I'll suck it up when that time comes. I have had the 2600n printer for over a year now and consider it one of my best printer purchases. I got it at Staples when it was on sale for $299. Installation on the Mac was plug and play with no problems whatsoever.
Not worth even the low price they sell for. Even worse, because it slowly consumes color toner even if you never print in color, you can end up with all three colors empty and then have to spend almost $250 to replace them to be able to print at all.4) All 2600 series printers come with color toner cartridges that are less than half full compared to the replacement cartridges so you will have to replace all 3 of them surprisingly early, again setting you back close to $250.5) Beware of the self-calibration routine. It is less than a year old and the color began to decay a mere 6 months into its lifetime.2) Beware that even if you set the printer to use only black and white for printing, it slowly consumes color toner anyway. Sadly, unless you're happy with "color" meaning completely unpredictable, psychedelic mixtures of colors very different from what you see in your source material, you'll probably do like I did and avoid using the color feature most, if not all, of the time.Think VERY carefully when buying a color laser of any sort, but avoid the HP 2600 series completely. The quality of black and white prints are good and the usual HP quality is apparent in construction, BUT:1) The color is not only terrible, it gets wore over time.
They are junk. 3) The printer will refuse to print if ANY one toner cartridge is close to empty so you cannot just print black and white only and replace the color cartridge later. My HP 2605 started out OK, but now prints a magenta haze over 50% of the area of all color prints even if I change toner, run the cleaning routines or use different color management software. Beware the low price on the HP 2600 series printers. HP claims there is nothing wrong and refuses to fix or replace it.
It consumes color toner and if it runs often enough you'll have empty cartridges even if you never printed in color.Overall, the total cost of ownership for these dogs run almost into the inkjet range unless you routinely print in color.
HP is a fantastic brand and I will buy another one but I'll guarantee you that it won't be this model. I'm not sure that the printer even lasted a year and it is now in the dumpster. I had one of these because I got a good price on it and wasn't interested in speed at the time. They are definately slow but I could afford it and had always wanted a colored laser printer for minimal use.well I got minimal use. They have a known problem with shadowing problems and of course that is what happened to mine.
For the majority of people that's not an issue, but if you're browsing for a low-cost reputable color laser and you DO use Linux, be aware that this one isn't for you.Second, and worst of all: I have fried the fuser roller on mine recently because I - stupidly, perhaps, but understandably - tried to use HP photo-glossy paper in the printer. First, in general this has been a great printer, worthy of the venerable HP name.Now, on to the caveats.First, this printer is essentially "Windows only." I do not have a Mac but I can tell you that there is no way in the world to get Linux to print to this machine. It melted the glossy layer of the paper onto the roller, and I now have a very large doorstop instead of a printer.I hope these remarks will be helpful to someone.
The resolution of the printed pages was even better than I had expected. Drivers are available for Mac OS X and different versions of Windows. I can print the same flier from a Word document, but once I convert it to PDF, it loses the font graphics. The display on the front shows how much of each toner remains, a helpful feature if you're about to print a big job.
For a good quality, low cost black-and-white laser printer, I recommend Brother HL-2040 Monochrome Laser Printer. Because I can print using Word, I deducted only a half star for this.I don't recommend this as a solo printer if you print a lot in black-and-white since the cost of toner and the slower speed makes it inefficient for simpler tasks. If you use a Mac and expect to print a lot of PDF files, you should be aware of this potential problem. Perfect for home or small business use, it prints professional-looking, crisp color sheets at a decent rate, although not as fast as a higher end model should. (It takes about 30 seconds from turning the power on to printing the first, full-color page; a ten page job takes approximately 2 1/2 minutes). Given the price of replacing them, it adds real value since most printers come with 1/2 full toner. This is a non-PostScript printer.The only problem I had was printing from a Adobe PDF document on my Mac.
Use this as a supplement for times when you need high resolution color that is more colorfast and glossy than an inkjet. Sometimes it amazes me at how affordable color laser printers have become, and this HP printer is an excellent example of such a printer. This particular model comes with full-size color toner cartridges. The same PDF document prints fine from a Windows machine, so it has something to do with the Adobe Reader for Mac.
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