Ready to take your memory cards.

At $699.99, the Color LaserJet 2605dtn certainly is priced right for a SOHO color laser printer. You make a sacrifice with speed - its color and monochrome print speeds are nowhere near blazing. But the 2605dtn offers many features not usually found on affordable color laser printers, and it produces great-looking images and text.

The 2605dtn comes with a pair of paper trays that hold a combined 500 sheets, a large amount for a mid-volume small business. The printer supports automatic duplexing (printing on both sides of a page), but we could only find the manual duplexing option in the driver software. The manual is vague about the automatic duplexing feature, and we didn't find an automatic duplexing option in the built-in printer settings. We were able to find only Windows instructions on HP's website.

The 2605dtn has memory-card slots, so you can pop your memory card out of your digital camera and right into the printer. The 2605dtn's tiny LCD makes navigating the menus more difficult than we'd like, but after a few minutes of poking around, we were able to print an index sheet. The 2605dtn's photo print quality is no match for a photo inkjet printer - it lacks the richness and color depth that inkjets are better at reproducing—but it's quite good. The 2605dtn did a great job of replicating skin tones, producing accurate colors and color gradients, and preserving fine detail. While we're talking image quality, the 2605dtn's text is sharp, and business graphics reproduced nicely.

HP rates the 2605dtn's speed at 12 pages per minute for monochrome pages, but we found it to be closer to 10 ppm when we printed a 50-page Microsoft Word document. Still, that's not bad. When printing a Microsoft Excel spreadsheet with color charts, we averaged 4 ppm. And when we printed a 15-page slide presentation that featured full-page bleeds on each slide, we averaged 1.3 ppm. A little slow for a color laser, but much faster than an inkjet printer.

The one major consideration with the 2605dtn is the price of its consumables. Black toner cartridges cost $74.99 at HP's online store, while cyan, magenta, and yellow toner cartridges are $82.99 each. That's nearly $324 for a set of toner cartridges, almost half the price of the printer itself. Since the 2605dtn comes with full-size cartridges, it may be a while before you need new ones, and in that time, the prices may come down. But if you're a high-volume shop, prepare to pay.

The bottom line. The 2605dtn is a complete package for the price. Save some cash for the toner, though.

COMPANY: HP
CONTACT: www.hp.com
PRICE: $699.99
REQUIREMENTS: Mac OS 10.2 or later, Ethernet
Good price. Handy memory-card slots. Comes with PostScript 3 emulation.
Vague instructions for automatic duplex printing. Replacement toner cartridges are pricey. Small LCD.