HP LaserJet 2605dn

Just search Google for 2605dn reviews. You'll find many of them.

I purchased the 2605 dn a few months ago and for the most part it works fine with my Mac Pro. Setup was easy and normally it prints everything I send it. Have not tried duplex printing.

Some negatives: I found the original toner does not last very long, compared to the Dell laser printer it replaced. The toner is very easy to replace however. I have yet to find a way to get toner levels to appear on my screen, only a small indicator in the printer window. It prints PDF files with bright red backgrounds so I do not print PDFs from it.

I have a Pages 08 designed two sided brochure I print often - not duplexing but just run a few page one's then turn them over and print page two's. Recently printing page two has become an iffy thing. Sometimes it will, other times it shows "printing" in the printer window briefly then goes to the normal window showing toner levels and does not print page 2. Does not make sense but that is what is happening.

99% of the time it does great and I like it much better than the Dell but I have had problems as mentioned above. That is my experience, hope it helps.

Gary

Any thoughts on what might cause a new 24" 10.4.10 iMac to have crashes whenever printing to a new HP 2605Dn Color laser? Install went well, test pages print Ok then suddenly we get catastrophic app crashes when printing - the app simply shutsdown as though it had never been open. Ran "Print Center Repair", trashed all com.apple.print..plists, deleted and reinstalled printer - works once or twice then crashes.

The 2605dn has been an excellent printer for my environment (both Mac and Windows computers). HP's support for the Mac environment is not nearly as extensive as what is provided for Windows, and I don't think the Mac driver is unusually complicated for finding certain features like duplexing relative to their Windows print drivers.

The toner level is a good example of this. In Windows, there's an app (HPToolbox FX) which can provide this information and a lot of other stuff such as e-mail alerts on jams and toner levels. Don't feel too bad that they didn't port this to Mac though - it's slow and clumsy to use.

However, it's easy for you to see toner levels and most of the other printer management information as well from your Mac. If you open any browser and access the IP address of the printer, there's an embedded web server in the printer which reports and lets you manage all this information. If you know the network address, just enter that on the address bar. If you don't know the IP address (if you used DHCP for instance), then access the system menus on the printer display - press the right arrow to get the Main Menu, then right arrow again until you see Network Config, then TCP/IP Config, then Manual and you'll see the current IP address.

Your iffy printing is probably another minor annoyance of the 2605dn. When you print your "second page", if the driver perceives this as a request for the manual feeder then you may see it barf if you don't feed the paper properly (it needs to "suck" the page in from the manual feed tray). I would think that it would probably have grabbed another page from the normal tray though if the feed was the problem.

Good luck

We bought this a little over a year ago.

Printing black and white or word docs with color text are examples where it performs excellent.
Print from iPhoto, Photoshop CS3, Word with any image embedded are examples where you may as well start your print jobs before dinner and hope they are done when you get back. I can print 10 pages on my HP Inkjet before I get my first page on the HP Laser.

The duplex feature is very handy for saving sheets of paper, printing handouts for the bookclub or PTA.

Did I mention the weekly conversations? They go something like this, "Dad, is the printer broken?" Me, "No it isn't broken, it's just slow." Replace 'Dad' with any other job I have and the conversation is the same.

I am really struggling with the decision I made to buy this printer.

My Konica laser broke down 6 months ago and I've been loving the duplexing feature and text and photo quality of this printer. Web page printing really saves paper using duplex and is as speedy as my old Konica 5400. However, multiple page documents from Powerpoint, Word, or Pages take F-O-R-E-V-E-R. They look good - toner doesn't stink like Konica/Minolta - but it is sadly slow. If you are in a hurry - spend more for speed. Home use and a very low volume business it's great - for a monthly newsletter with alot of graphics you'll need to weigh your opportunity costs vs the low retail price. I'm keeping mine because of print quality, but if I had to print more complex documents on a regular basis I'd go nuts with the lack of speed.

PS: I have installed the maximum DIMM memory and it made no difference in speed.

I have had this printer for a year now...and it is PAINFULLY slow.
I would not recommend it to anyone..go seek out other alteratives.

Cheers

I have to echo most of the previous comments. We got this printer for home+home office use, as we have several computers (Macs + PCs), and wanted to replace an older HP inkjet whose prints were always crooked. We wanted:
1) A networked printer so we don't need one of the Macs to be always on to be a share-host for it
2) A duplex unit to save paper
3) A laser as my wife does desktop publishing and occasionally wants to print proofs etc. from InDesign & other Adobe DTP apps; we expected a laser to provide more accurate graphics/book layout output than an inkjet, and photo quality (to print photo albums at home) to be about the same.
I also expected a laser to be quicker overall than an inkjet, and as they are higher-priced, and supposedly business-oriented, to be better built (inkjets are a far cry from the old Laserjets of the early 90s -- I know of ones still in daily use after 15 years).
4) Ongoing cost per page wasn't much of an issue -- we don't print that much (a few pages per day on average).

We now have it for 10 months, and are sorely disappointed in this printer, to the point that I'd return it if I could.

The good:
-- B&W and color text and most web pages print cleanly, consistently and more-or-less at the rated speed.
-- The duplexer works fine, and essentially no paper jams.

The so-so:
-- Photo quality is poorer than a 5-year-old inkjet (even on the same photo paper); colors are different than they should be, much darker & flatter (and we've tried messing with color profiles etc. It's probably solvable with a lot of Photoshop work, but why should we have to bother?

The bad:
-- Images with lots of bitmaps (photos, complex layouts etc.) print excruciatingly slow, and by slow I mean sometimes hours per page; in a couple of cases I even waited overnight, just in case, but the print job never came out.
This varies quite a bit by the source app (iPhoto3 couldn't print a 1.5MB image in less than an hour or two; iPhoto4 prints it "OK", within 4-5min). If you generate PostScript files from InDesign some layouts print reasonably quickly via Adobe Acrobat, but Apple's preview doesn't work on the same file. I've also had some trouble printing from PCs, but I'm not sure whether they were using the PCL or PostScript driver.

All this is on OS X 10.3.9 on two different Macs, latest drivers, latest HP firmware for the printer (I've spent a lot of time on this...) We also tried maxing the memory to 192MB from the std. 64MB, but it makes no difference.

It generally appears as if print time is some kind of power function of the size of the print job (and happens on 1-page jobs -- it doesn't have to be multipage).

Essentially, you can't just hit "print" -- it a big guessing game, and fighting with apps trying to reduce the size of the job.

No, who knows, maybe this is an Apple issue and solved in Leopard, but I have no way or time to debug this -- What it would really take is a printer driver developer.

HP support are freindly, but not really Mac-oriented, so they haven't been able to help.
They claimed there is a checkbox somewhere that supports "ASCII mode" for PostScript, but I have no idea what they mean.

This printer should never have been sold as Mac compatible in this state. In the context of Windows use, I haven't heard of any such issues (people say it's "slightly slow", and I'd guess the usual is using a native PCL5 driver rather than PostScript emulation), so it's most likely a Mac driver/PPD issue.

This printer doesn't fulfil any of the reasons we got it for, so I can only recommend to stay away from it.

I've heard good things about Brother's HL series (IIRC there's also a version with WiFi) playing very well with OS X.