The HP Color LaserJet CP4005dn Printer ($1,499.99 direct) is just the sort of color laser you'd expect from HP. It's fast, capable, and strong on output quality, particularly for text and graphics. The printer is a little limited on paper-handling. Still, it should be sufficient for the small to medium-size office or enterprise-level workgroup it's meant for—not to mention a single-person shop that needs to print enough pages to justify getting it.

As tested, with its standard paper capacity, the CP4005dn can hold 600 sheets of paper, divided into a 500-sheet drawer and a 100-sheet multipurpose tray. It also includes a duplexer, and it offers an 80,000-page monthly duty cycle, as well as an optional 500-sheet tray ($299 direct) for a maximum 1,100 sheet capacity. But there are no other paper-handling options.

The slightly more heavy-duty—and more expensive—Konica Minolta magicolor 5570 offers a duplexer option, a stapler finisher option, a maximum 1,600-sheet capacity, and a duty cycle of 120,000 pages per month. But if you don't need the extra paper-handling, those options obviously don't matter. And if you don't need to print on both sides of the page, you can save money by getting the CP4005n ($1,099.99 direct), which HP says is the same printer, without the duplexer.

Setting up the CP4005dn is surprisingly easy, except for moving it into place. It's a relatively big printer, at 24.7 by 20.5 by 23.5 inches (HWD). It's heavy enough, at 107.8 pounds, that you'll need at least two people to lift it. Once you've found a place for it, however, physical setup is almost trivial: Simply remove some packing materials, snap in the plastic output tray, load paper, and plug it in. You don't even have to pull out the toner cartridges to prepare them. They're already in place, inside the printer, ready to use. Network setup is also easy: Plug in the network cable and run the fully automated installation routine.

HP rates the CP4005dn at 30 pages per minute for black and white pages and 25 ppm for color. More important, it delivered appropriate speed for the rating on our tests (timed with QualityLogic's hardware and software, www.qualitylogic.com).

The printer's total time on our business applications suite was a reasonably impressive 7 minutes 51 seconds—a touch faster than the Konica Minolta 5700, but much slower than the Xerox Phaser 6360DN, which is only a little more expensive and blasted through the test in 5:28. For photos, the CP4005dn averaged just 10 seconds for each 4-by-6 print and 14 seconds for each 8-by-10, earning boasting rights as the fastest color laser for photos that we've ever tested.

The photo speed is particularly remarkable because the quality is reasonably high for a laser printer, despite one troublesome issue. Reds and oranges in my tests were a touch oversaturated and shifted toward magenta, so an orange, an apple, and red bell peppers, for example, were beyond the range of acceptable color. But colors in most photos were well within a realistic range, even though some photos were a little darker than they should have been. You won't mistake the output for true photo quality, but unless you have a highly critical eye, you'll probably consider the photos good enough for things such as client newsletters or handouts to potential clients or customers.

Text quality is good enough for almost anything you might want to print. On our tests, all of the standard fonts that you might use in business documents were easily readable with well-formed characters at five points—and some passing that test at four points. In fact, even fonts that didn't qualify as easily readable at four points had well-formed characters, but with such thin lines that they looked a little gray, making them harder to read than they should be. Only one highly stylized font with thick strokes needed 20 points for easy readability.

Graphics quality is easily good enough for any internal business use, as well as for things such as trifold brochures and other handouts. I saw just a touch of posterization (colors changing suddenly where they should shade gradually) and dithering in the form of visible graininess. More important, however, colors were well saturated and vibrant, and there were no other flaws worth mentioning. The CP4005dn even does a terrific job on thin lines that most printers can't handle.

If you don't need the additional paper-handling options that you can get with the Konica Minolta or Xerox printers, the CP4005dn is a worthy alternative. It's significantly heavier than either of those printers, which may make it more difficult to deal with in a small office, and it's significantly slower than the 6360DN, but it has an edge on output quality compared with both, which helps make it a perfectly reasonable—and slightly less expensive—choice.

Benchmark Test Results
Check out the HP Color LaserJet CP4005dn Printer's test scores.

Compare the HP Color LaserJet CP4005dn with other laser printers side by side.