Hewlett Packard LaserJet 3600n Printer

Looking around Newegg, as I do very frequently, I saw a Color Laserjet 3600n going for 250$ with free shipping.  I immediately thought “That’s GOT to be a mistake!,” as it is a 600 dollar+ printer.  Well, it wasn’t a mistake, and I bought it the next day as I had always wanted a color laser printer but never wanted to spend the money for a good one, and didn’t want to settle for a 150$ one with outrageous consumable costs.

First I’ll start up with some specs to keep you all from having to look elsewhere:

Print Speed: 17 ppm leter (color OR b&w)
First Page Print: ~14 seconds
Resolution Modes: 600 dpi
Memory: 64 MB
Processor: 360 MHz
Interface: USB 2.0 / RJ-45
Input Capacity: Multi-purpose tray: 100 sheets; Paper Tray: 250 sheets
Dimensions: 15.7 x 20.07 x 15.7 in (WHD) 57.6 lbs
Toner: 6000 page black; 4000 page-per-color (CMY)


FIRST IMPRESSIONS / INSTALLATION

Seeing the box on my deck, I began to wonder if I could fit the printer on the desk like I wanted to, or even if I could fit the box through the door at all.  I did manage to get it through the door without a problem, but it is nearly impossible to carry being so huge.  The printer itself is pretty sizeable and heavy too, so make sure you have room for it.  It covers most of the top of an average filing cabinet.

The printer comes with full toners, which are actually worth more than I bought the printe for, being a higher end laser, they don’t really cheat you.

The software installation was painless. It has simple on-screen instructions as soon as you put in the disk. Of course, being the techie I am, I downloaded the drivers ahead of time to see what they looked like. I didn’t like the drivers once installed, though.  They seem rather limited, with no DPI or density settings or anything really, basically there’s paper size and color/grayscale, along with duplexing, not too much beyond that

PRINTING

The printer is reasonably fast.  It is 17 ppm for something simple (black or color text), but add a graphic and you’ll see a slight delay between each page even for multiple copies of the same thing, cutting the speed down to 10-14 ppm depending on the complexity of the document.  It’s definitely faster than most inkjets, though.

 The noises this printer makes are somewhat scary.  It clicks and thunks when you first turn it on, and it makes sounds similar to a beep/squeak noise whenever it gets done printing, goes into standby, or wakes up. The noise level is a little loud if someone is sleeping in the same room or even one room over. It’s certainly not too bad you could be on the phone or hold a conversation over it (though it would be annoying). It would probably wake up a light sleeper though.

Text quality is superb, it doesn’t have that thick super-heavy weight of many color lasers.  Graphics are flawless.  Photo quality is the best I’ve seen out of a color laser.  It can’t compete with an inkjet by any means for photos, but they have a nice glossy look to them, with lots of detail.  The only flaw in them is they tend to lose detail in darker regions, but all-in-all everything comes out nicely.

The manual tray is very nice. It holds 100 sheets and feeds perfectly straight pages through it. The printer will default to the manual tray if you put something in it, unless you specifically specify tray 2.   

I’ve printed several hundred pages (some from each tray) and haven’t had a jam or crooked feed yet.  It actually surprises me that this hasn’t happened given the straight-up paper path, but apparently HP thought it through.

Again, this is another paper tray meter that never registers the tray as full.  The old LaserJet ones (the 4000, 4050, 4100s) were good, but this one doesn’t seem to show more than 3/4 full at any time.


PANEL

The panel has 7 buttons, and a two line backlit display.  It’s easy to find just about anything in the menus, and the panel seems well built.


 CONSUMABLES

The black toner is rated for 6000 pages, the colors are 4000 each.  The black toner runs 120$, and each color runs 130$. Given this, the cost for a color page is 11.75 cents, and black is 2 cents.  I rate the black cost as excellent and the color cost as fair. 


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Overall, I love the printer, I dread the day I will need to buy toner, but given that they are 4000 page colors and a 6000 page b&w, they should last a long while.


UPDATES-

Page 1370- Struck by massive power surge--amongst everything else somewhat electronical in the house.  I tore the thing apart-not wanting to waste all the toner or replace the awesome printer.  Near the top of the printer I found two fuses, one was blown.  A quick trip to the hardware store and I was back in business.  For every other thing fried by the surge, the equipment did its very best to protect a 3 dollar fuse, but in the color laserjet's case it killed the fuse and saved the rest of itself.  FWIW, my Brother HL-5240 had melted things inside from the surge. 

Page 2036- Still going after the fuse was replaced, but the yellow cartridge said it ran out of toner--set it to override on out and we're still good to go.  I see no quality issues.  I've printed about 1000 full page photos, so I expected this.

Page 2531- Everything but Magenta is supposedly out of toner now, but prints are still as beautiful as day 1.  On the override setting, it alternates on the display between Ready and Replace Supplies, but doesn't flash any lights or annoy you in any way.  Magenta is at 13%.

Page 3473- I have all four toners boxed next to the printer, but I still haven't had to replace any of them.  The printer doesn't show the slightest lack of quality as of yet.  I wonder how far I can make it before I actually have to replace a cartrige.  Setting the printer to override on out is a must!  I'll let you speculate as to why HP designed the printer to make you replace toner thousands of pages before you really needed to.