Hardware article and Tip

Design
With a price tag of ฃ480
the new HP Colour LaserJet 3600n is small
weighs 27kg and has deep handholds
so one person can carry it easily. At 15.7 by 15.7 by 17.7 inches (HWD)
this laser printer can easily fit into a busy home office or individual office in a large company
should you need this level of speed and paper capacity. Its simplistic design makes jam-clearing and maintenance uncomplicated. However
the wall and hinges don’t appear to be too sturdy. It can be setup in the standard manner applicable to its class of printers
and the network installation routine is fully automated.

Paper Handling

The HP Colour LaserJet 3600n offers high-speed performance
with an engine rated at 17 pages per minute (ppm) for both colour and monochrome
fairly good graphics quality
even better text
and photographs that are good enough for client newsletters and the like. HP has also included an Ethernet connection for easy sharing over a network.

However
the main paper tray feels a little unsteady and has nothing to stop it when pulled out
so users should be careful not to drop it. The paper-length and paper-width guides are easy to adjust. The printer has a 100-sheet auxiliary feed in addition to the enclosed 250-sheet tray. You can boost this number to 850 by adding a 500-sheet feeder for ฃ280.

Features

A two-line backlit LCD screen on the 3600n's top panel displays a complete set of menus
which is easy to navigate with buttons for going through menus
selecting items and going back.

This printer comes with 64MB of memory and unfortunately you cannot expand that
nor add a duplexer
which makes expansion options very limited. If you need the extra memory
then consider HP's 3600dn
a ฃ670 model with a duplexer and twice the memory.

Performance

The 3600n prints black text at a reasonable 13ppm and colour graphics a bit faster
at 13.5ppm. In contrast
the Lexmark C522n prints text at 14.2ppm and graphics at 12.3ppm. However
if saving money is your real priority
and you don't print much colour
consider Ricoh Aficio G700
which prints fine text at 12.1ppm but misses the cut on graphics speed and quality.

The 3600n disappoints the user with its print quality. In a few tests carried out by popular technology magazines
the text looked greyish instead of black
showed some roughness in large point sizes
and lost fine strokes. This is also the case with some of the 4-point output
which looked slightly grey
rather than black. Colour graphics did not negotiate shading ramps smoothly and produced blockish transitions. However
the printer makes the cut with colour accuracy and detail. Additionally
it prints greyscale photos very well
with fine detail and smooth shading.

Graphics are easily good enough for internal business use
but not satisfactory for handing out to important clients or customers. The most important issue in a number of tests was misregistration
with the colours slightly out of alignment. It resulted in a noticeable white gap between some blocks of colours
around some lines
and around some colour text on a colour background. Thin lines also tended to disappear. Additionally
colours tend to shift toward darker shades
losing detail in dark areas and making some colours look muddy.

On the whole
the 3600n's text output has high enough quality for most purposes. Unless you have an unusual need for small font sizes
it is unlikely that you will print any text that the 3600n can't handle. Lexmark's similar C522 sells for around ฃ100 less and offers equal speed and better quality
though Lexmark's cost per page is slightly higher than HP's and the difference may add up over time.