HP Color LaserJet CP2025dn

The HP Color LaserJet CP2025dn is something of a flagship printer for Hewlett Packard. Its their attempt to bring color laser printing to the small office or home worker for a reasonable price.

The compact chassis, print speed of 20 pages per minute and a built-in duplexer do sound good, but can a printer this cheap and this small really cope with the needs of a small business?

The short answer is yes it can. The longer answer is that the ease of use, print quality and speed make the CP2025dn a worthy contender for your office space. The printer is very easy to use. The only consumables you have to worry about are the cartridges and they all slot in to a horizontal drawer behind the panel at the front. The cartridges are of the all-in-one variety which includes the drum, toner and fuser. The black toner lasts for 3,500 pages and the colors for 2,800 so you shouldnt need to change them that often.

While we didnt see the purported 20 pages per minute when printing color, it didnt matter once we saw the quality. Our test document contains a mixture of text, images, graphs and photos to really put the printer through its paces and the CP2025dn didnt disappoint. The real highlight were the photos. They really stood out with a sharpness and vibrancy we dont normally experience with laser printers, especially at this level. Color balance was very good, there was plenty of detail, no banding whatsoever and great color transition throughout.

Text was equally as good with sharp, defined edges that were straight and exact. Graphs were well shaded and outlines and images were the same. Overall the output was excellent and definitely something we only normally see on much more expensive printers.

The quality printing is accompanied by a decent set of print management tools and a print server accessed via web interface. The included drivers needed updating from the HP website before it worked properly, but checking for the latest drivers should be standard practice for users now.

The CP2025dn provided outstanding prints at a decent speed. The toners last a good while and the printer is very easy to manage over the long term. The 250 sheet paper drawer can be expanded to 500. The built-in duplexer works well and the ability to network it out of the box is another great feature.