Small businesses can get more for their money with the full-featured Color LaserJet 2840, HP's first colour laser all-in-one. The device consolidates print, fax, scan, copy, and photo memory card capabilities into one relatively compact unit. It's still big and bulky (497x518x570mm, 34.2kg) compared to an inkjet all-in-one device, but HP's clever 4-colour toner carousel design helps to keep the footprint to a minimum. Print quality is good and the device is a snap to use - vital ingredients of a business workhorse. If consolidation is key, the Color LaserJet 2840 is an excellent value offering for workgroups of up to around 10 users.
Pros: Easy to use; good build and prints; ADF; memory card slots
Cons: Noisy; no auto duplexing; no hard disk; basic paper handling
The Color LaserJet 2840 offers an excellent range of features, including claimed A4 print speeds of 20ppm for black-and-white pages, 4ppm for colour, 600dpi print quality (up to 2400dpi with HP's ImageREt 2400 enhanced print technology), integrated Fast Ethernet networking and Hi-Speed USB 2.0 connectivity options for easy sharing its all-in-one functions, in addition to the ability to easily add photos to business documents with HP's ImageZone software and built-in photo memory card slots. You can also convert physical documents into electronic format quickly using scan-to e-mail, scan-to folder and scan-to network folder options.
The all-in-one device comes with most of the features a typical business requires (graphics users need not apply). It's also well built and robust, so should handle general office wear-and-tear adequately. It includes a PCL 6 printer driver and has HP PostScript Level 3 emulation, but its multipurpose tray holds up to just 250 sheets of various print media or 10 envelopes - hardly workhorse requirements! The device also ships as standard with four colour print cartridges (cyan, yellow and magenta) that can print up to 4000 pages at 5 per cent coverage, as well as a black print cartridge that can print up to around 5000 pages at 5 per cent coverage (a typical business letter has 5 per cent coverage, according to HP).
Connectivity options are reasonable, comprising a Hi-Speed USB 2.0 port and a port for connecting to a 10/100Base-T network. There's no built-in wireless print technologies, such as Wi-Fi or Bluetooth, and the printer isn't compatible with PictBridge digital cameras. The Color LaserJet 2840 comes standard with a 96MB, although there's one available DIMM slot for memory expansion and additional font support. The memory is expandable to 224MB, but most documents can be printed with the standard amount of memory with the aid of Memory Enhancement technology (MEt). MEt automatically compresses data, virtually doubling the device memory and accommodating more complex printing with available memory.
