HP Colour Laserjet 1600 - Review
The Color LaserJet 1600 uses an in-line engine, which means black and colour prints should take pretty much the same time. This is borne out by our test results, where our five-page mono text document took 56 seconds to complete and our five-page colour text and graphics piece took 57 seconds. This gives a print speed of around 5.3ppm, a little way off the 8ppm claimed by HP. Subjectively, print output appears slow, too.
Printed text is crisp and clean, with little sign of splatter or poorly formed characters in its 600dpi output. Colour print is also clean, but there’s a slight fuzziness with black text on coloured backgrounds. This is a little surprising, as the printer uses HP’s much heralded ColorSphere toner, which should offer ‘better flow onto the page’. Colour rendition is fair, though colours still looked too intense in our photo test piece and there was loss of detail in darker areas.
HP claims the printer is particularly quiet and we wouldn’t argue with this, measuring it at a peak of 58dBA and an average below 55dBA. It makes few of the clunks and thumps which many entry-level laser printers, including earlier HP models, produce.
So, to the all important running costs. The Color LaserJet 1600 takes four drum/toner cartridges and HP considers the transfer belt a lifetime component. The cartridges are the Q6000A Black, Q6001A Cyan, Q6002A Yellow and Q6003A Magenta and are rated at 2,500 pages for black and 2,000 pages each for cyan, magenta and yellow. HP Original cartridges are around £50 each, with good quality compatibles at around £30 for the black and £35 for colour online at HP Colour Laserjet 1600
This gives original print costs of 2.49p for a black page and 10.60p for colour and about half that using the compatibles.
Verdict
This is an inexpensive colour laser printer to buy and is easy to maintain and use. It prints quietly and with a minimum of fuss, but colour output is not as natural as with some others and you may need to tweak the software to get the tints you want. It’s also quite costly to run, with page costs at the upper end of the bracket for this class of colour printer.
