The HP Color LaserJet 2550L is ideally suited for home office and small office use. At 18.98" x 17.8" x 12.8" the 2550L is extremely compact for a full color laser. Print speed is 20 page per minute for black and 4 page per minute for color. Monthly print volume is recommended at 30,000. This should be more than enough for most home and small office users.

The 2550L has a fairly long spool up cycle. When making a test print, it took about 30 seconds to rev up and about 4 seconds to print. On multi-page jobs, it took up to a minute to cycle through its toner and imaging system before it started printing. But once it's printing, the unit is quite quick. The printer is quite noisy when printing - which was one of the reason why we installed it in the closet. The long spool up time pretty much kills the rated printer speed of 20 page per minute for black and 4 page per minute for color. Once we added in the spooling up to the calculation, print speed slowed to a leisurely 9 page per minute for black and about 1.5 page per minute for color.

The HP Color LaserJet 2550L did offer superb print quality however. Even the smallest fonts in our test prints were quite readable and clear. The printer also did a fantastic job printing line-art. There was no visible banding what-so-ever and all the lines stayed distinct. Color prints were a bit dark when using plain paper, but the image was sharp. The image brightens right up when we switched to higher quality laser paper and sharpness increased another notch.

The 2550L works with a wide range for printing media - from plain paper, to envelopes, to card stock. Not once during our print testing did the printer ever jam. The paper tray holds 125 sheets and output prints at the top of the printer. You will need to use the straight-through bypass to print card stock, and then only one print at a time.