The Color Laser Printer Guide: Vendor & Product Profiles
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than most other printers starting at under $700. But you
should look at the OKI Printing Solutions 5500 and
Lexmark C522 machines. They offer comparable color
speeds, and the Lexmark adds on PostScript as well.
If you want a solid HP model and a moderate sticker
price, this is the family to check out.
Chart entries — pages 76–77
Hewlett-Packard Color LaserJet 3000
Hewlett-Packard Color LaserJet 3000n
Hewlett-Packard Color LaserJet 3000dn
Hewlett-Packard Color LaserJet 3000dtn
15ppm full color
30ppm black & white
Sum-up: A workgroup printer series with superior black-and-
white speeds and the ability to control color use.
This printer family features fast speeds in black-and-
white and pretty good speed in color. Unlike some other
HP models, this one is more suited for an environment
where standard black-and-white office printing is
required and color printing is more occasional. That’s a
description that fits many offices.
These printers come with a powerful 533MHz proces-
sor. The printer series supports both PCL and PostScript
printing, whether from Windows PCs, Macs, or various
flavors of UNIX systems. As with other newer HP print-
ers, the color functions can be blocked for some users or
for certain hours so you can have some control over the
cost of color printing in a mixed-use environment. That
makes especially good sense with this printer family,
which you can use as your standard office printer most of
the time, with color as an added feature.
There are four configurations:
lThe base model, the Color LaserJet 3000 ($999),
whichfeatures 64MB of memory and 350 sheets of
standard input.
lThe Color LaserJet 3000n ($1,199), which features
128MB of memory plus a built-in Ethernet port.
lThe Color LaserJet 3000dn ($1,499), which adds stan-
dard automatic duplexing.
lThe Color LaserJet 3000dtn (its price was not avail-
able as we went to press), which adds an extra 500-
sheet tray as a standard feature.
All of the models have USB connectivity. Wi-Fi wire-
less and gigabit Ethernet connectivity are also options.
A100-sheet multipurpose tray handles transparencies
and envelopes. A 250-sheet tray is standard on all mod-
els, and a 500-sheet input drawer is optional. (It is stan-
dard on the 3000dtn.) HP recommends a volume of up to
5,000 pages per month, but its maximum duty cycle is
50,000 on the 3000n and 3000dn, and a full 60,000 pages
on the 3000 and 3000dtn.
Preinstalled toner cartridges have capacity for 6,500
black-and-white and 3,500 color pages.
Consumables costs for this family come in at 16.5¢ per
color page and 2.9¢ a page for black-and-white — both
on the high side.
This is a very practical series for offices where color is a
desired, but not constantly used, feature.The price is rea-
sonable enough. What would make it more useful is
more paper capacity: the 850-sheet total input limits the
sizeof the workgroup that can use it. There are other
models in this price range that offer more than twice the
paper capacity,notablythe Xerox Phaser 6300 family and
the Panasonic WORKiO DP-CL22.But those models are
similarly limited in output to a 250-sheet tray, so the
paper capacity is less of an issue.
The Color LaserJet 3000 family offers good features for
afair price. It also offers the HP name and the upgraded
administrativetools and improved color toner that come
with the brand.
Chart entries — pages 75–76
Hewlett-Packard Color LaserJet 3000
Consumables costs at-a-glance
Price
Yield
Full-color cost per page
Black-and-whitecost per page
Black print cartridge $134.99 6,500 $ 0.02 $ 0.02
Cyan print cartridge $127.99 3,500 $ 0.04 N/A
Magenta print cartridge $127.99 3,500 $ 0.04 N/A
Yellow print cartridge $127.99 3,500 $ 0.04 N/A
Drum/black $173.99 20,000 N/A $ 0.01
Drum/4-color $173.99 5,000 $ 0.03 N/A
TOTAL PER-PAGE COSTS
$0.17 $ 0.03
16.53 2.95
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