HP LaserJet Pro CP1525n review

At less than £180, HP's LaserJet Pro CP1525n is already inexpensive for a colour laser. However, buy it from one of HP's 'Preferred Partner' dealers before 30 April 2011 and a £45 cashback offer makes it amazingly cheap.

Although it's a single-pass printer (it doesn't have to pass the paper through four times like the cheapest colour lasers do), it's still slower to print colour (8ppm) than mono pages (12ppm). Standard features include an Ethernet port and 128MB of onboard RAM. For another £35 or so, the CP1525nw model adds wireless networking, but duplex printing isn't available within the range.

This is a reasonably compact printer that's generally very easy to set up and install. It should be quite simple to maintain, too, since there are just four consumables to replace. The colour cartridges have a life of just 1,300 pages, but that should be plenty for most people. The LaserJet's single-sheet multipurpose feed is a very basic affair, with the correct orientation for paper and envelopes simply stamped into the metal sheet visible behind the opening.

We weren't expecting the CP1525n to be fast, but we were startled by how slow it seemed in practice. The 24 pages of our mixed-colour graphics test emerged so slowly that we wondered if it might be quicker to draw them ourselves. While this could be irritating if you're in a hurry, the upside is that the printer is very quiet and its fans stop immediately after each job, making it ideal for a home office.

We were fairly happy with print quality. Our black and white test photo was a little dark and picked up a cool blue tint. This was less noticeable in colour photos, which were crisp and detailed. Although illustrations and other graphics were a little lurid, the printer delivered brilliantly smooth shade progressions in our PowerPoint slides, and crisp outlines that were free of jaggedness.

At 11.7p per page, printing in colour isn't especially cheap, but mono prints are more affordable. As long as speed isn't your top priority, and you won't be printing an inordinate number of pages, the CP1525n is good value. In fact, for a total spend of just over £380, you can print 2,400 mono pages and 1,200 colour pages, which is very competitive, but it's less so for medium or heavy use. Even without the cashback offer, the CP1525n wins a Budget Buy award.