The HP Colour LaserJet 2605 is one of Hewlett Packard's most impressive printers intended for the home user market. It prints monochrome fast and efficiently, it handles colour well enough to print pictures for long-term framing, and its cost-effective thanks to affordable, high-quality HP 2605 toner cartridges. The one issue with the 2605 is that it's a little pricey for the average consumer. Recognising this, HP introduced the 2605dn, which is much more accessible because it's nearly half the price of its bigger brother, yet it doesn't sacrifice much; all the functionality is there; HP has just removed the memory card slots and the third paper tray.
Design
For the Colour LaserJet 2605, HP uses an unusual physical design along with a common colour scheme: medium grey with business white. The shape is essentially a cube except that the face of the machine has a significant curvature. The curvature is the door that you open to access the internals and to replace the HP 2605 toner cartridge with ease. On the top, you have the paper feed and a thin-strip control panel on the face side. The interface isn't sophisticated, but everything is there, easy to use, and it gets the job done.
Advantages
There are a number of advantages, including printing high-quality colour pages at a rate of 10 pages per minute. It also has 64MB of memory built-in. Users can expand that up to 320MB, but most users won't need additional memory. The printer does an excellent job even when handling large jobs that are complex. The printer also has high-speed USB ports, its plug-and-play in Windows environments, and it has a built-in Ethernet print server. As with all colour printing, it can be expensive if you do it often, but at least with the HP 2605 you're getting what you paid for. One further advantage is the inexpensive HP 2605 toner, as well as the fact that you can buy coloured HP 2605 toners separately so that you only buy what you need.
Disadvantages
One issue with the HP Colour LaserJet 2605 is that it is extremely heavy for its size. Most users will set it and forget it, and therefore this won't be much of a drawback. But it is something to keep in mind if you do intend to move it or are buying it for dorm room use. If possible, you may want to station it on a dedicated print station.
