HP Color Laserjet CP3525dn

Love it for two-sided catalog printing

I used to have my 12 page color catalogs printed for me at a printer but now with our online catalog, I don't get that many requests, prices change, etc... so why buy 250-1000 catalogs from a printer that may or may not sit around for a year or so??

I open my catalog pdf, hit the duplex button, and it quickly makes two-sides color copies of my catalog. Excellent printer. Loud as most, but much MUCH faster to the first page than ANY color laser I've used in the past. I love the straight-color paper path and it's FAST...

A Good Product Saddled by Poor Customer Service

Let me begin by stating that I am a long term HP user. My first HP laser printer was the HP LaserJet II+ - a printer that was over-built and virtually indestructible. I have tended to buy replacement printers that are HP. Unfortunately, the experiences with this printer have turned me off of HP products. This printer was purchased on September 25 2009. The reason that it was purchased could be found in the specifications - high speed, color, and duplex. Plus, it could work in a work environment consisting of both Windows and Macs (my home office). Upon delivery, setup was relatively painless. BTW, if you are using this printer as a network printer, you will find the amount of control and information given you when you enter the Printer's IP as amazing. I have a Xerox and its home page gives you about half of the information. Initially, the printer worked well. Then the problems began. The Magenta color was no longer being transferred. I searched the HP site for troubleshooting hints -- not much there. Consequently, I went on-line and used the on-line chat. It became very evident that the people working the chat line, while friendly, were simply reading a script. I had gone through a number of steps to identify the potential problems and to rule out other problems. When I noted this, I was told to go back through the steps again. Next after three trips to the chat line, and over 4 hours of my time, I asked to have the printer repaired. The person informed me that he would send me the information for repair and authorization next day. This has not happened. Customer support with this product is downright poor. If you buy this printer, hope that you do not have any problems.

Other issues to be aware of:

1. Consumables are expensive - expect to pay about $224 per cartridge. Each cartridge lasts between 4k-7k. This means that the first time that you replace all of the cartridges, you are spend more in cartridges than the printer cost you. Something is not right here.
2. Accessories for this printer are difficult to get and relatively expensive.
3. The printer is relatively picky about the quality of the paper that it gets.
4. The printer does not feel as solid as past HPs. What I mean by this is that the plastic being used is thinner. It is disconcerting to see some of the plastic covers flex when you close them.

At this stage, given my experiences, there are better printers out there for the money -- the Dell 3130 and the Lexmark C734dn come to mind. These are printers with equivalent monthly print cycles but more reasonable consumables (note that with the Dell, you will have to pay more for the duplex).

As a final thought, I am disappointed in the product quality and customer support that has coming out of HP for the last couple of years. These are no longer as durable nor as well supported. As an example, I have an HP 2840 MCP. This is a great machine. When I upgraded to Vista-64 bit, the only drivers that HP would provide are universal drivers. What this means is that I have a unit that can print, scan, copy, and fax in color. However, this driver only allows me to print in B&W. My Xerox unit received drivers for Vista-64; the same with the Minolta-Konica. Furthermore, HP has indicated that they have no interest in supporting the 2840 beyond providing universal drivers. This situation is equivalent to have a hyper-sports car with a governor that prevents it from going over 50 mph. Being a university professor at a research oriented school, I print a lot and I have found printers like the Xerox and Minolta-Konica up to the challenge. I am afraid that I cannot say the same about the HP.

Again, a good product hindered by poor customer service.

Awesome Printer

I love this printer. It set up easily on my network in my home office. I have had this printer about 6 months and I have printed on paper, light card stock and have run lots of envelopes (regular #10 size down to 4.5 inch X 5.5 inch size). It feeds them all! I love the color and find that the duplex works well. I have other B&W laser printers for general text printing that are cheaper to run, but when I wanted to print 1000 invitations to an event with a B&W photo on the front I used this printer because the quality was amazing. I find I can print a two sided full color page on regular paper and the output is better looking than most prints that I have gotten from color prints at Copy Stores at $1.00 a page for two sided color laser.

Fast, great quality prints.

This thing is so fast, the prints are usually done by the time I walk down the hall to the office to pick them up. I love this printer! It's super fast, does a fantastic job of printing, and the ink cartridges last forever around here. We will get 3 YEARS of home office use with the Xtra large black cartridge! It was easy to set up and works great on our mixed Mac and PC network. Love it. The printing engine is made by Canon as was our last HP Printer (4500N) and it was rock solid. I finally gave it away, just because it was so OLD. It still works and never once failed us. I highly recommend this printer if you are looking for something that "just works".

Great Printer-Outrageously Expensive Toner

The 3525dn is a great printer with excellent image quality and speed. The only drawback so far is the cost of toner. To replace all of the toner cartridges you are looking at $800 to $900 and for the color toner they only sell the "A" or low yield cartridges. Hopefully someone will come out with some aftermarket cartridges or at least HP will produce the more economical "X" cartridges.

image quality is amazing

I got the printer about 3 weeks ago. I print training manuals with a lot of graphics in them. I have just printed my first set of manuals which consisted of about 4000 total pages and I can not get over the amazing image quality.

My old printer ( 6 months ) was the Brother 4070. I upgraded because I was looking for better image quality. The HP 3525 has much better color and image quality.

Now I just need to find some cheaper tonor cartridges for it. Any leads?

Great Business Printer for Top Class, Color Printing.

This is truly a wonderful product for a small to mid-sized business. It is quick, and prints beautiful pamphlets, newsletters, etc. in color. I cannot tell the difference between these prints and prints from a professional print shop... It also does card stock which lower end printers will not do well. It is a good sized printer and is heavy, but does a great job for in house printing. The cost per page on black and white is about 2.5 cents a page and in color it is about 14 cents a page which is much better than other lower end products. If you print more than 2,500 color pages a month, you'll save the costs of a lower end, $400 printer in less than 4 months. It does double sided printing well too.

Good printer---customer support has pros and cons

I received this printer on January 22 and got it set up successfully last night (January 28). It is too early for me to comment on the print quality. What I have seen looks fine but I have only printed 4 pages so far and have not yet tried the duplex option.

I am writing this review to comment on HP's customer support, since an earlier reviewer had a totally negative experience. Some of my dealings with the customer support system were good and some were bad.

I received the printer on a Thursday while I was at work. I couldn't get to it until Saturday. Then I unpacked the printer and removed all the protective tape, etc. When I turned it on it stopped immediately after the memory check with an error message "Inflate failure. Download RFU file now. Download RFU on USB port" or something close to that. I knew I was in trouble. I went on line and found the latest firmware update (RFU = remote firmware update) and downloaded it to my Mac. But I couldn't figure out how to send it to the printer, since the instructions said to use ftp (which works over the Ethernet connection). That requires knowledge of the printer's IP address which it probably didn't even have yet, since the failure occurred so early in the startup process. And even if had one there was no way to find out what it is, since the keys on the console elicited no response at all. Besides, the instructions on the printer's display said to use USB. Nowhere in the instructions was the use of USB to do a firmware update ever mentioned.

So I made my first call to tech support. It is one of those horrible voice-activated menu systems. It took me several minutes, enunciating my responses as carefully as I could, to finally get transferred to tech support. It was at that point I was told that tech support hours are 5:00 a.m. to 5:00 p.m. Pacific time M-F and closed on weekends. I was out of business until Monday.

Monday morning at 6:15 a.m. I called again. This time, while I was carefully saying the model number of my CP3525dn, the computer voice interrupted me. It said that it had determined that my printer was no longer under warranty, so I was not eligible for phone support. It told me to use the e-mail system and hung up. If I had not gotten further on Saturday, I don't know what I would have done at this point. Most likely I would have called the company I bought it from and had them take it back. But, because of Saturday, I knew that the real problem was the poor quality of their voice-activated menu system. So I tried again and finally, by about 6:25, I got connected to an actual human being.

The lady I first talked to was polite and friendly, but obviously working from a script and not very knowledgeable. She worked with me for about 45 minutes. She told me how to use USB to download the firmware update. But when I downloaded the file absolutely nothing happened. She had me try numerous things (restarting my Mac; power cycling the printer, etc.). Several times she put me on hold for 5 minutes or so to try to get help from another customer support rep. But nothing worked. She finally gave up and transferred me out of customer support to a department she referred to as simply "hardware". The lady there was also polite and friendly and sounded much more knowledgeable. She worked with me for an additional 45 minutes. She asked me a lot of questions and was able to determine that the formatter card (essentially, the internal computer in the printer) was malfunctioning. She thought it might be a bad connection of the memory module. She talked me through removing the formatter card from the printer and manipulating it. Then she had me re-install the card and try again. The same error immediately appeared. So she promised to send me a replacement formatter card. I asked if it wouldn't be more effective to send a repair person to my house. But she told me that the formatter card is considered to be a user-replaceable part and there was no way a repair person would be sent. The warranty I read on the Internet before buying this printer explicitly stated that the printer came with a one-year warranty which includes in-home repair by HP.

The replacement card was sent as promised. It arrived the next day (Tuesday, which was yesterday). I installed the new card and turned the new printer on. The initialization process was frighteningly long. I thought I had some new problem. But after a very long time the printer said "Ready"! At this point, the quick start guide says to print a configuration page and check for the IP address. I did so, and discovered that the IP address of my printer was 0.0.0.0. The manual says this means there was a failure to assign the printer an address. The manual makes all sorts of suggestions which were clearly not appropriate for my situation. It also asked me to make choices between options which I did not understand and the manual gave no explanation of their meaning. So I decided to wing it. I went into the Mac printer/fax system utility and told it to add a new printer using Bonjour (which I knew this printer is supposed to support). It worked. It found the printer, set it up, and I was finally up and running. What an ordeal.

So here are the pros and cons of my experience with HP regarding this printer:
Pros:
(1) friendly, courteous support reps; the second-level lady I talked to was clearly very knowledgeable.
(2) the replacement part came quickly;
(3) the replacement part worked;
(4) setting up the printer on my Mac was a breeze, once the hardware problem was solved.
Cons:
(1) An absolutely horrible and unreliable voice-activated menu system;
(2) The hours of tech support availability are terrible, and clearly designed for people who live in the Eastern time zone. Anyone (such as me) in the Pacific time zone cannot interact with tech support without taking time off from work.
(3) The in-home service part of the warranty does not cover all possible hardware problems. There are user-replaceable parts which you the user must replace. If you are afraid to dive into the hardware I strongly recommend against buying any printer from HP.
(4) The quick start guide which comes with the printer makes assumptions about the type of installation the printer will be used in (a commercial environment on a system which has a professional system administrator) which will be inapplicable to many customers.
(5) The how-to-use manual which comes on the CD has so little information it is laughable.
(6) Firmware updates are possible via both Ethernet and USB. But only the Ethernet method is mentioned in the instructions.

Outstanding - better than i expected

I cannot say enough about this great printer.
I have 4 computers in my home: 2 Wintel Laptops, and 2 Macs.
I need a FAST color laser printer that ALL could print to wirelessly. The box came, i opened it and set it up in 10mins.
The Macs (of course), already had the print drivers and self-installed immediately. With the IBM laptops, I put in the installation disks and had them going in 5 mins.
All computers printed the FIRST time once i plugged it in to my Airport Extreme base.
That said, it is an AWESOME printer: Fast, good color, quiet, and efficient.
I was skeptical at first, but i couldnt be happier a month later....

Poor customer support

I have owned 6 new HP printers and been very happy. This one is very expensive and HP has the worst customer support. I will never purchase a printer from HP again.

I needed to print envelopes and tried with this printer. It kept saying it was jammed, but there was no paper in the printer anywhere. Started making lots of noise so I called tech support. People say they will help you, but they don't. Next thing I know I'm being transferred from one person to another. Each one saying they will take care of it. The tech support says someone will call back in 2 hours. No one ever calls. I called back and then they said they need a couple more hours. No one calls back. Called yet again 2 days later, put on hold for 1.5 hours can't find anyone who understands what I mean about #10 business envelopes, get run around about printer not supporting #10 business envelopes at 24 lbs paper. I don't know of any other envelopes and neither does person from HP.

I end up wanting to return the printer since after 4 days they have no fix for it. They can't find my invoice even though I have the number with HP letterhead on it. They keep telling me I don't have the right number, but I purchased it directly from HP. Finally after 2 more hours I find someone who can find my invoice number and they fill out the return. Very poor tech/customer support. Very rude people trying to tell me my printer doesn't support #10 envelopes.

All adds up to I will no longer purchase HP printers or any of their technology. I had even purchased additional toner at an outragous price of $825.00 for all replacements. Printer only costs $899, almost cheaper to purchase new printer than toner for it.

Do not purchase from HP!