This question kinda straddles between facts and opinions, but I want facts, please.
I’ve seen some extraordinary looking bargains on this printer. There appear to be tons of them out there - not that that’s unusual for a HP. I’d like to know what kinds of problems there are with them, why they’re so cheap (even if the toner isn’t). I’m considering buying one. I’ve got a Dell 1700 (B/W), which I love, but of course it would be nice to be able to print in color, and it still be a laser (my printing needs are sporadic; with an inkjet, I had to buy cartridges every time I wanted to print - an exercise in economic stimulus, perhaps, but not one I’m able to make).
Not the 1600 but the 46xx: only use them for printing colour and never black & white because they use colour toner to enhance the black. This is expensive.
The review in PC Magazine notes “a slight misregistration between the various toner colors, leaving a thin slice of white between some bordering blocks of solid color. Photos tend to be a little oversaturated . . .” But it got the Editor’s Choice award from that magazine. And it costs only $224, even if you buy it directly from HP.
I’m not sure what you mean about there being “tons of them out there” which should not be surprising, as it’s a product regularly sold by HP (i.e., it’s not discontinued or some sort of limited release).
AFAIK, the Color LaserJet 1600 is essentially the same as the 2600 series, but without the built-in duplexing or networking, and possibly a little slower. (I’m quite happy with a 2605 that I bought a year and a half ago.)
If you take a little care with the driver setup, you can set it for truly black-only printing so you don’t go broke.
The only thing I’m not wild about is that it stirs itself in a calibration routine every xx hours (you can configure this via the printer’s internal webpage) and that it pays no mind to how recently it’s printed something. This assumes you leave it turned on all the time - it draws less than a night-light when it “sleeps.” For home use, you’ll want to be aware that the thing may decide to come to life in a variety of whirring and clunking noises for a couple minutes in the middle of the night, which may not be ideal if it’s in your bedroom.
There’s an option in the driver of all HP color LaserJet printers that says something like ‘Print in Black Only’ that will keep it from using any color toner.
If you install the driver twice and label one “Black” and the other “Color” and select the “Black” driver when you are only printing B&W, it’ll save you from that problem. Set the default for the “Black” driver to ‘only print in black’.
If not, any time you are using “Process Black”, it will combine all four colors to make black. Some programs don’t give you the option of “100% Black” and “Process Black”.
It doesn’t seem to consume any toner at all, at least not to the extent a Pitney Bowes postage meter goes through every time you turn it on. (Postage meters at home - that was a clever scam to sell very expensive ink by the gallon.)
Agreed, but when printing a page with a colour logo and black text, it still used the colour for the black. Besides, I tried your method and they still used the colour version.
One of my customers has one 1600 and one 2600 both in service for over two years, and have had no problems with them, except for one thing.
We just bought a new 1600 from CompUSA’s going out of business sale. It is apparently DOA, I can’t get it to do anything. That seems like a pretty big exception, but I don’t know for sure that the unit we got was not a return. When we bought it there were none on the shelves and the sales person had to rummage around in the back to find it.
But I’m hoping HP will arrange for a replacement without a lot of hassle. I’m going to try to get in touch with them today.
One thing to be aware of is that I believe they are one of HP’s printers that must use a driver, you can’t print to them in text only mode using a non-Windows or non-Mac app using just the old ASCII command strings like you can with many of HP printers. The only way this would be a problem is if you needed to use one from an old DOS box, or possibly from a *nix box. (I don’t know if there are any *nix drivers available or not.) And it would be pretty strange to buy a color laser for a text only app anyway.
This sounds promising. Much as I love the Dell B/W laser, I’d be reluctant to hang onto it, if I could be sure that the color toner in a color printer wasn’t being used for B/W printing - my son is thinking of going back in business for himself, and could use a good printer. And these days, everybody expects everybody else to be able to print in color. :sigh: And going to a store to do it does not appeal to me. It’s bad enough to have to do that for copies. (I guess that all those years working in offices with access to all the different equipment spoiled me.)
How easy is it to set up the black only? If I understand you correctly, you install the driver once, naming it black, then do it again with the standard setup, and name it color. Is that it?
Yes. That’s just for ease of use. Rather than going into the driver properties and looking for the little checkbox every time you want to print B&W, just have a separate driver set up for black only printing.
Go into the printer driver (START|Settings|Printers and Faxes, then right-click on the HP 1600 and select properties), check off the black and white option, and the hit OK. Rename the printer driver to HP 1600 Black. Then install the driver again. You’ll have two drivers to the same printer and you can select the Black option for B&W printing or the other driver for color printing.
While the printer may still dump some color toner during calibrations, it should drastically reduce your color toner usage.
If that printer has an option for a “Supplies Status Page” (it should but it’s a low-priced printer, so maybe not), print it out and it should show how many pages have been printed using each supply and how many pages are remaining. From there, you can gauge the difference between the two settings. If you’re printing Black only, you should see the number of pages left on the Black cartridge decrease, but the C, M & Y cartridges should stay the same.
Dell toner is more often than not proprietary - you can’t just pop into OfficeMax to buy a cartridge, so you’re locked into their shipping schedule and pricing.
The “black only” configuration for the LaserJet does work as intended, so it’s reasonably thrifty in that mode.
This is correct. HP describes the drivers as “host-based.” So as long as you’re only running Windows 2000/XP/Vista/Server 2003, you’ll have no problems, but I can’t find drivers for any other operating systems.
My computer desk, fortunately, has room for two large monitors + printer & scanner on top, but not for the 2nd printer until/unless I replace the remaining CRT monitor. I can’t do all of it at once, alas.
I live in a modestly sized apartment, and expect to move into an even smaller one in a few months. Having a printer stand in addition to the large desk isn’t feasible.
Sorry for the belated answer - I’ve been otherwise occupied.
