HP Color LaserJet CP4525n

Just another Great printer

This is a great printer.

On a Mac, to get good colors, you need to choose the color profile in the printer instead of using one of the ones Mac offers.

Good

Like most affordable HP printers, this is kind of cheaply constructed, but in any case is the norm unless you're willing to pay a few thousand more. No major pluses or minuses. Drivers work with Windows 7 x64 and print speed is, as expected, pretty fast. Decent printer.

Won't owe you a thing...

I have a 20 year old LJ III, always just worked, File/Print and the pages came. Still works today.

Bought an Epson R1800 for color and bought nothing but problems, drinks ink, test pages every few days, 50/50 chance the page would even be useful, then one day the ink stopped flowing mid-print and nothing but white paper since. Cost to fix was hundreds of dollars. Life cycle cost per print probably ended up in the tens of dollars. File/Print and pray, every time. Epson? Never, ever, again.

So, back to HP and their new CP4525. Why not, buy a set of toner and HP will give you the little brother CP4520 is just about for free. A few dollars more and you get the faster CP4525 engine. Cost per page is built into the toner alone. Buy 2, just to get a second set of toner cartridges AND end up with a spare printer (Fuser alone costs $250). Soon enough you'll likely be able to dump compatible toner into those carts. Also, no need to worry about "chips", the diagnostic menu has option to warn only when cart's chip reports its "empty" but the printer will continue printing.

Sent 10 photo prints to the printer and all but one were perfectly useable. The poor one was a blow up of a 1" digital image to 5x7, very poor quality image to start with, and it took quite some time with Gimp to even get the R1800 to do a half way decent job. If you look at prints with a microscope, well, 1200x1200 isn't 2880x2880 so go ahead and get all squirrelly about that. But I put my photos in frames and look at them like a human, and they look just fine.

Tiny text print? Well, pretty much perfect.

Thanks HP. My LJ III owes me nothing. Now I look forward to years of fine color printing, without worrying about buying ink by the drop and knowing when I hit File/Print things will just work.

BTW, for photos, laser toners have a matte reflection, best to use a good matte photo paper. Glossy paper leaves too much gloss in white areas.