Nothing defines an office environment as much as the equipment you have there. You may have an excellent team of people but without phones, printers and reliable computers you’re lost and hopeless. I’ve discovered that for myself yesterday when I desperately had to print an invoice and discovered our Samsung printer wasn’t working anymore due to some problem we couldn’t establish right away.




Luckily, we had our reliable HP printer in the other room and I could make use of that and save the day. Apparently HP laser printers are the best bet when it comes to reliability. And if reliability isn’t the only thing you’re looking for, it’s ok because HP has plenty of other qualities to offer depending on what type of printer you’re interested in. If you want high quality and fast color and black printing you might be interested in the HP Laserjet 3500 color laser printer.

As design you won’t be to impressed with this printer. I’m not saying it should be looking sleek and have a glossy finish because that’s a rare case with office printers, but still, its monolithic, rather beige (ensuring that it doesn’t start out as white and slowly turn brownish) casing measuring 27 x 19 x 17.6 inches and weighing 71.5 pounds could have been improved a bit. Moving this printer will obviously take more than one person and it’s just recommended to find it a place and leave it there forever. On the top of the printer you’ll just find a 150 sheet output tray. The more important features are found right where you’d think you’d find them, on the front.

On control panel is a bit to the left on the front side. It includes a 2.5 inch LCD screen composed out of four little boxes, each one of them serving for indicating toner levels. Each box also has specific color icon beneath it standing for each color of ink. All the useful control buttons are also found on the control panel. The Select/Resume print button means you’ll be able to quickly cancel a print job if you want to.

The Laserjet 3500 HP laser printers are easy to set up both as software and as hardware. The front cover opens up to reveal the four toner cartridges (cyan, yellow, magenta, black). Paper capacity consists of a 250 sheet input tray which may seem a bit too little for busier office environments. If so, you always have the option of purchasing an additional 500-sheet tray. A multipurpose tray is also situated on the front of the printer and can hold an additional 100 sheets if held open.

It supports various media types including envelopes, card stock or transparencies. As standard connectivity the Laserjet 3500 comes with USB 2.0. Optionals however include Jetdirect 175x print server, Jetdirect en3700 external print server or Jetdirect 380x 802.11b wireless print server. HP claims about 12 pages per minute for both color and mono as far as printing speeds go. It’s not the fastest printer in the world but not too bad either. Overall HP’s Laserjet 3500 is a good entry-level color laser printer that shows reliability and good maintenance over time. The quality of text and business graphics is good but users may frown a bit when they talk about printing speed.

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