HP 5550 Toner
LaserJet 5550 Toner Cartridges

HP 5550 Printer Review

The HP LaserJet 5550 color laser printer aimed at small or medium office environments. It has a large amount of expandability options available, so it is particularly well-suited to the small office expecting its needs to grow in the coming years. If all you need is a personal color printer, consider the HP 1600 toner printer.

Starting with one 500-sheet input tray, the printer can be expanded with as many as three additional input trays, at 500 sheets each. This represents a great amount of expandability, but it should be noted that output capacity will remain the same. Still, the room to expand will be a highlight for the growing office.

For the HP 5550dn color laser printer, the 'd' and 'n' in the model name stand for its duplexing and networking capabilities, respectively. Duplexing allows for double-sided prints, reducing paper costs. The networking capabilities include a built-in ethernet port for sharing the printer across a network, allowing it to be utilized by a computer on the network. The printer includes support for Mac and Linux users, meaning no one will be left out. Other models include the 5550N, which has networking, the 5550DTN, which adds extra paper capacity, and the 5550HDN.

The HP LaserJet 5550 toner cartridges have a very large capacity of 12,000 pages for each color laser toner cartridge and 13,000 for the black printer toner cartridge, meaning they will not have to be changed often. To lower printing costs, users can choose to purchase compatible HP 5550 toner cartridges. The compatible HP LaserJet toner cartridge is equivalent in quality to the branded HP toner cartridge.

Print speed is decent, at around 21 pages per minute, though some of its competition come in faster. Print quality is a bit of a mixed bag, however. Though most text is sharp and dark, there is some banding and other artifacts at times, and fine lines tend to fade in and out. Graphics prints tend to show quite a few flaws as well. Memory capacity may be an issue as well, as the unit only ships with 160 mb of memory. For a model designed for a multi-computer network, this will likely be too little. Consequently, many office environments may find they need to upgrade the memory of the unit, adding further costs.

Overall, the LaserJet 5550 is a solid laser printer with some great features and room to expand to meet changing needs. Inconsistent print quality and a small memory capacity may keep some buyers away.