Colour laser printing has never been more affordable and HP's Color LaserJet 2550Ln is a case in point. At a price that won't put off home users, the HP is ideal for people who want something to use for personal or work purposes - and as it is networkable it could be handy for a small business.
At this price you're not going to get high resolutions or massively fast print speeds - HP has other models with higher specifications, but you get what you pay for. If high quality prints aren't too important for you then the 2550Ln could be ideal.
The claimed print speeds - 19ppm (pages per minute) mono and 4ppm colour - were a little way off the results we achieved in our tests, but we've come to expect this from any printer we test. We got the HP to output 9ppm in mono and 2ppm in colour - not amazing results but perfectly acceptable at this price.
In terms of print quality, text was okay, but the colour output wasn't as impressive. With a maximum resolution of 600x600dpi the 2550Ln struggled to provide a sharp print when reproducing complex images, but for simpler graphics it was fine. The colours were about as good as you'd expect from a laser printer.
The networking capabilities of the 2550Ln are an obvious boon but you can get the non-networkable base model, the 2550L, for around £75 less than this configuration.
What really impressed us about the 2550Ln were the running costs. Text printing text will cost you about 1.3p per page, and colour pages are under 2p each. This is very economical considering the purchase price isn't that high. We were a bit disappointed with the 125-page output tray, though - we'd prefer to see something twice as big.
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