HP COLOR LASERJET 1500 COLOR TONER CARTRIDGES SET

HP Color LaserJet 1500 Review

Overview:

Unfortunately, Hewlett & Packard has discontinued the sale of the HP Color LaserJet 1500 series.  Fortunately, 3rd party retailers still offer this inexpensive printer for consumers who require a budget-friendly  purchase.  This printer is ideal for home offices and small businesses whom are budget-constricted.  It is a reliable printer that can print in Color or Black & White.  The HP Color LaserJet 1500 stands 14.80-inches tall, 18.98-inches wide, 17.76-inches deep, and weighs a trivial 52.7 pounds.  It will fit nicely upon any office desk or home credenza.  The bottom-line?  This printer is vastly matched for PCs in college or small offices for personal users.

Pros:

This printer is compact-ish and prints pages at a rate of 16 per minute in Black-based documents.  For Color-based documents, this printer prints at a rate of 4 pages per minute.  With a memory, of 16 Mega Bytes and a resolution of 600 x 600 dots per inch, it can handle relatively unsophisticated documents and images.  In lieu of its resolution and memory, ImageREt 2400 technology is incorporated in the printer.  Image quality is attributed by the ImageREt 2400's 2400 dots per inch resolution via the multilevel printing process.

Tray 1 for this printer is a multipurpose that can hold up to 125 sheets of print media or 10 envelopes.  Unlike the HP Color LaserJet 1500L, the 1500 has a mandatory 2nd tray that holds up to 250-sheets for standard media.  The prints are expelled to the output-bin or output-door that can hold up to 125 sheets.  The output bin on top of the printer will dish out documents face-down and is suitable for most jobs.  The output door, located on the rear of the printer, is ideal for heavy-paper jobs, special media, or light-paper jobs.  This printer utilizes a standard USB port for direct connections between a single node.  An optional JetDirect external print server can be purchased for networking.

The LaserJet 1500 facilitates automatic calibration; when turning printer on/off, every 100 pages printed, inactivity for more than four hours, or replacement of cartridges.  If users have color-related issues, they can manually calibrate the printer.  Calibration is simplified with the LaserJet 1500 Toolbox.  All users need to do is double click the Toolbox and access the 'Diagnostic Tools' from the 'Troubleshooting' tab.

The control-panel is natural to understand and interface.  It has 'Supplies Status' lights for indication of when cartridges are low or empty.  If it blinks, then it means that the cartridge is empty and will no longer print.  If the light is consistently on, then it means that the color indicated is running low.  It has a 'Cancel' button to stop jobs and a 'Go' button to continue. 

Cons:

The HP Color LaserJet 1500 lacks the highly-valued duplex printing capabilities.  Users would have to manually duplex prints.  It may be economically-friendly to utilize duplex features, but it reduces productivity and speed of businesses.  No one genuinely wants to stand next to the printer flipping pages while waiting on the printer's relatively slow prints.  While it is considerate for HP to include an optional print server capability, it does not make much sense to use this printer in any Token Ring, Ethernet, or LAN; because the printer lacks the performance-power and print rate required in most networked environments.  Networking this printer may, in fact, hinder its potential because of the payload of requests.  Though, it may make sense to network this printer for accessibility amongst nodes.  Still, this printer is not ideal for heavy networking.