Great Printer for Home or Business

I've had a the HP3600n at work for 2 years and have had no problems with it. It simply does its job as designed. I like it so much I just bought one for my personal use at home. HP has dropped the pricing so that the printer costs less than the value of the toner cartirdges inside it. That's a pretty good deal. No printer is perfect and the one at work makes a little squeaking noise with high volume work. No big deal.

Included toner is supposed to be good for 6000 pages black or 4000 pages color. I believe replacement toner is around $100 a cartridge. As far as I know HP laser printers will actually detect the amount of toner and run the cartridge until near empty. I understand other brands such as Samsung and Epson simply count total pages printed and may lock out a nearly full cartridge. With daily use at work I was able to go a full year before replacing all 4 cartidges. At home this should be cheaper to operate than my ink-hungry Epson inkjet printer.

At work I use it mostly for general printing and also for marketing materials, custom brochures, some photos on glossy paper, labels, and a few envelopes. The HP at home will be ideal for the kids' school papers and other general uses such as letters and envelopes. While not designed to be a photo printer, the 600x600 output is good enough for family snapshots when using glossy paper.

Paper handling is superb. I've had one paper jam in a year. I do lots of special graphics and labels and have had very few color registration problems and everything always lines up correctly and consistently when printing labels. The 50 page alternate tray for double-sided or special paper works great. This is an essential feature if you do double-sided documents or labels. Some lesser laser printers are single-sheet manual feed or make you use the regular paper tray often resulting in poorly aligned printing.

I learned the other day this is not a true Postscript printer, but PS is emulated in software. I never noticed a difference except occasional errors when printing dircetly from Photoshop. Is it the printer or Photoshop or my configuration? I'm not too worried about it.

Setup instructions are easy to follow. You can either connect to a single computer via USB or to a network via Ethernet. I connected to my Linksys router and used the menu option in the HP menu to automatically assign the IP address for the printer. This step isn't entirely clear in the instructions. The IP address will be an extension of the router's address. Simply write this address down and type this IP in when requested by the HP setup disk for each computer on the network and you are good to go.

If your color is a bit off, don't worry. the 3600n has adjustments for color levels and alignment. I've never had to mess with it on either printer, but it's nice to know it's there.

Bottom line: A trouble-free workhorse printer for home or office.