Review: HP LaserJet CP4525 colour printer

Colour printers usually fall into one of two camps. They're either quick, but of little use for anything other than office documents, or capable of professional quality output, albeit slowly and at a price.

The latest member of the HP Colour LaserJet family, however, bucks that trend, delivering top quality colour prints at speeds to match monochrome printers. It's also much more affordable than a lot of the alternatives, making it attractive to enterprise workgroup and small business buyers alike.

Three models have been released, all based on the same single-pass A4 colour laser engine from Canon and all coupled to an HP controller with an 800MHz processor and up to 1GB of memory. Native resolution is 600dpi, rising to 1,200dpi using HP's ImageREt 3600 enhancement technology, with PostScript, PCL6 and direct PDF printing as standard, plus an integrated HP Jetdirect adapter with a Gigabit Ethernet interface for printing over the local area network.

Prices start at £779+VAT for the base CP4525n model, but it's worth paying a little extra for the CP4525dn we tested, as this comes with a built-in duplexer for double sided printing, hence the 'd' in the name.

Alternatively, for buyers looking for extra capacity, the CP4525xh (£1,899+VAT) comes with three additional 500-sheet paper trays, plus a stand fitted beneath the single 500-sheet tray on the cheaper models. The CP4525xh also has a full 1GB of RAM (the other two have just 512MB) plus an encrypted hard disk to hold downloaded forms and other documents, which would otherwise add £499+VAT to the price.

Speed and performance
A robust and well made printer, the CP4525 can be used to print up to 10,000 pages per month at speeds of up to 40 pages per minute (ppm) whether in colour or monochrome. That, of course, is a maximum, and actual throughput will depend on the kind of document involved. Having said that, however, we got pretty close to 40ppm when printing simple Word documents and spreadsheets, with good speeds too when printing more complicated PDFs and photographic images. Equally importantly, the first page put in an appearance in under 10 seconds on all of our tests. HP's patented Instant-on technology ensured that this happened even when the printer was in low-power standby mode, a feat rival vendors struggle to emulate.

Print quality
We were equally impressed with the quality of the output. The HP laser produced crisp black text and vivid, professional quality colour images with no discernible banding or other common distortions. HP puts this down to the uniform particle size of its recently introduced ColorSphere toner technology, leading to faster and more even distribution of toner on the page, and a much wider range of colours. The best results were obtained using coated paper, but reproduction was excellent even when we used photocopy paper, and we'd be more than happy to use the CP4525 to produce colour flyers, brochures and other professional documents.

Cartridges
As with other LaserJets, the cartridges contain toner and optical components, and you need four altogether: one for black, plus cyan, yellow and magenta. However, whereas the colour cartridges (£245+VAT each) are rated for up to 11,000 pages each, the standard black cartridge is limited to just 8,500, which seemed a bit odd. All the more so when we discovered a high-capacity replacement costing £214+VAT compared to £136+VAT for the standard size and giving double the page count. We can't imagine why anyone would want to pay extra for the smaller cartridges or have to change them more often.

On the plus side, if the high-capacity cartridge is used, running costs should work out at around 8p per page excluding paper, with very little extra that needs to be changed on a regular basis other than the toner cartridges. This job took us just seconds, with no fiddly catches or need to look at the manual to find out what to do. We simply pulled down the cover at the front, slid out the old cartridges and clicked the new ones in place.

Other plus points include support for HP's universal print driver, and a straightforward remote setup via the built-in web interface. This was just as well, given the tiny LCD display that would otherwise have to be used to configure the printer. Simple Network Management Protocol support is built in, and the printer can be managed alongside others using HP's popular Jetadmin software.

The CP4525 is A4-only, but a similar A3 model (the CP5225) is also available. At just 20ppm this is somewhat slower, but gives the same high-quality results. Both products are available direct from HP or its resellers, complete with a one-year on-site warranty.

Single-pass A4 colour laser; up to 40ppm (colour or black and white); 800MHz processor; 512MB RAM (expandable to 1GB); 600dpi native resolution, 1,200dpi with HP ImageREt 3600 technology; integrated duplexer; USB 2.0 port; integrated Jetdirect Gigabit network print server; PCL6, Postscript Level 3 and direct PDF printing v1.4; 100-sheet multi-purpose feeder; 500-sheet paper drawer; optional extra 500-sheet or three x 500-sheet paper feeders; maximum paper capacity 2,100 pages; optional secure hard disk