Perfectly priced for the home office, yet powerful enough and network-ready for small businesses and workgroups, the Color LaserJet 2600n is a fantastic value offering for producing business, marketing, and sales documents in-house. The extremely affordable printer produces high-impact colour materials and supports an additional paper-input tray, but its 264MHz processor and maximum memory configuration of just 16MB RAM may not offer enough grunt for print-intensive environments. All print languages are host-based too, so you'll need a speedy computer processor to power the unit. Nevertheless, the Color LaserJet 2600n is exceptional value.

Pros: Attractive price; excellent print quality; relatively quiet printing
Cons: Basic specifications; moderate paper handling; tad slow


HP is targeting small businesses with its latest colour laser printer. Designed to provide a relatively flexible and affordable option for in-house marketing and basic external communications, the Color LaserJet 2600n printer sets a new standard for its class with a combination of exceptional affordability and excellent print quality. The only led down is its print speed, which is slower than cheaper monochrome laser models.

Colour has been growing in popularity because of lower prices and faster print speeds for both monochrome and colour, which in turn will open up market opportunities as customers try colour printing for their home or office for the first time. HP's Color LaserJet 2600n is an excellent product to help customers make the move from relatively expensive-to-run inkjet printers.

The Color LaserJet 2600n represents a pretty significant breakthrough in desktop colour laser performance at an affordable price. It also has an eye-pleasing and compact design (406x452x370mm, 18.37kg) and should take up minimal space in your working environment. In fact, the printer is almost small enough to sit on your desk - a feat we'd never have thought possible with a colour laser. Its claimed print speed of up to 8ppm in both black-and-white and colour are impressive too (on paper at least), it comes with built-in networking (100Base-TX) and USB 2.0 ports (no parallel), and has one-door access to the print cartridges.

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