This is our second color laser printer in the past two weeks, and after a week of use we feel this is a keeper. The previous printer we tried, the Brother HL-4040cdn Color Laser Printer with Duplex and Networking, was a step better than this printer in nearly every respect, except color accuracy. But my wife had to have a printer that was highly accurate for her project and this little printer was able to meet her high expectations. The Brother just could not cut it with the color accuracy, despite all the advanced calibration steps we tried.
Let me admit that I was a bit apprehensive about getting this printer given the many negative early reviews. Thankfully, it seems HP has addressed the quality problems with the later releases of this printer since it has been receiving excellent reviews lately.
The print quality of this printer is astonishingly nice. HP is confident enough to let the printer print out a photo quality test page that has brilliant, vibrant colors, and amazing depth for a laser printer.
The build quality of this printer is good but perhaps a step below the substantially heavier Brother HL-4040cdn, which seems definitely capable of a higher duty cycle. This printer has a smaller footprint and feels more at home in a home-office as opposed to a business office. That said, in our first week of use we have had no technical issues with this printer whatsoever and, despite being slower and less robust than the Brother, it suits our needs just fine.
After networking it with our Linksys router and assigning it a fixed IP number, we found to our delight that most of the settings of the printer can be manipulated using a web browser after pointing the browser to the printer's IP number. The printer's built in webserver page displays information such as toner levels and estimated remaining prints and has a full menu system to allow you to change the settings.
Our only grouse with this printer is that the default color output for photos is a bit too dark, causing dull pictures. I browsed through HP's Support pages and found that the dark color issue was quite common, but I could not find a solution for the correct Print Density settings for this printer. So, after much testing, and lots of wasted paper, I came to the same conclusion as another reviewer that there was too much magenta, which tended to smear the subtle details.
My Color Adjustments:
Using the "HP ToolboxFX" program that is provided, or through the web interface, it is necessary to modify the "Print Density" settings under "Device Settings". I arrived at the following settings: cyan: 0, magenta: -2, yellow: -1 and black: 0. To keep things simple, I kept the values consistent accross all the print density attributes, i.e., contrasts, highlights, midtones and shadows, although each individual attribute should probably be further tweaked. To my eyes colors were true, with slight heaviness in magenta remaining.
It was also necessary to brighten the pictures themselves slightly, using a software tool such as Adobe Photoshop or Arcsoft Photoimpression. I simply used Photoimpression to bump up the brightness by 10% (or "auto brighten" by two levels).
Finally, when printing, I found it is also necessary to set the the color theme to Photo. I did try sRGB, Vivid and Photo (Adobe RGB 1998) color themes, but they all tended to push too much magenta. Only with the color theme set to Photo was I able to get true reds and vibrant, almost photo quality prints on 8.5 x 11 glossy photo paper.
Conclusion:
Since there is a relatively easy way to get around the dark color issue, I have no problem edorsing the HP CP1518ni as an excellent color laser printer for home use.Get more detail about HP Color LaserJet CP1518ni Printer (CC378A#ABA).
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