The HP LaserJet Enterprise 500 Color Printer M551dn ($314.96 at Amazon) printed out our business applications suite at a near-record clip for a color laser, and its output quality is above average, making it suitable for any standard business need, including printing out basic marketing materials. This well-rounded printer (which also has a fairly low cost per printed page) is an easy pick as an Editors' Choice workhorse color printer for a smallish business with medium to heavy-duty printing needs.

The M551dn  measures 15.8 by 20.2 by 19.8 inches (HWD), larger than you’d want to share a desk with, and weighs 76 pounds, so it is best to use two people to move it. Controls on the front panel next to the small, color LCD are minimal: Buttons for Home, OK, Cancel, and Help. The display’s color is used primarily to show ink cartridge levels.

Standard paper capacity is 600 sheets, split between a 500-sheet main tray and a 100-sheet multipurpose feeder. The printer comes with an automatic duplexer for printing on both sides of a sheet of paper. (A version without the duplexer, the M551n, is available from HP for $699.) An optional 500-sheet paper tray ($319 direct) is available, for a maximum paper capacity of 1,100 sheets. The M551xh ($1,399 direct) adds the second 500-sheet tray as standard, plus an encrypted 250-GB hard drive.

The M551DN offers USB and Ethernet connectivity. I tested it over an Ethernet connection using a computer running Windows Vista.

Print Speed

I timed the M551DN on our business applications suite (using QualityLogic's hardware and software for timing), at an effective 9.0 pages per minute (ppm). That's a bit short of our record (9.5 ppm) for a color laser, and a very good speed considering its 33 page-per-minute rated speed for both color and black-and-white printing that’s based on printing text documents without graphics or photos—our test suite includes text pages, graphics pages, and pages with mixed content.

The Editors' Choice Xerox Phaser 6280DN ($649 direct, 4 stars), with a rated speed of 31 pages per minute for monochrome and 26 for color, took more than twice as long to finish the same tests, at an effective 4.5 ppm, while we timed the OKI C610DN ($789 list, 4 stars), rated at 34 pages per minute for monochrome and 32 for color printing, at an effective 6.7 ppm.

Output Quality

The M551DN’s overall output quality is above average, thanks to very good graphics and photo quality. Text quality is typical for a laser, which is to say good enough for any business use short of demanding desktop publishing applications that use very small fonts.

With graphics, colors were bright and looked reasonably true. Some black backgrounds weren’t quite as dark as I would have liked, and some very thin colored lines against black backgrounds could have been sharper, but there were no other issues worth mentioning. The graphics are fine for printing out PowerPoint presentations, and I’d feel comfortable handing the output out to clients or colleagues I was seeking to impress.

Photo quality was slightly above par. Colors looked slightly off in a couple of prints, but most approached true photo quality. Taken together, the text, graphics, and photos should be suitable for simple marketing materials like handouts or trifold brochures, or for real estate handouts showing photos of properties.

Running Costs

The M551DN has reasonably low running costs of 1.8 cents per monochrome page and 13 cents per color page. These trump the 2.8 cents per monochrome page and 13.9 cents of the Xerox 6280DN , while lagging the OKI C610's per-page costs of 1.5 and 10.9 cents per monochrome and color pages, respectively.

The HP M551DN offers a winning combination of fast speed, above-par output quality, and a reasonably low cost per page. It brings enough to the table to make it an Editors' Choice as a workhorse color printer for smaller offices with medium to heavy-duty printing demands. The OKI C610DN  has lower running costs and better paper handling options, but is slower and lags on output quality.

At the end of 2011, the Editors' Choice Xerox Phaser 6280DN was officially discontinued, but remaining stock is still being sold by Xerox and various etailers at a considerable discount. Its output quality, particularly for text, is slightly better than the M551DN. Its running costs, however, are higher than the HP's, both standard and optional paper capacity is lower, and it took twice as long as the M551DN to print out our business applications suite. If output quality is paramount, the 6280DN may be a better choice, but the HP LaserJet Enterprise 500 Color Printer M551DN offers a much better balance between quality, speed, and running costs. 

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