Trusted Reviews reviewed a HP Color LaserJet 1600 printer:

Printed text is crisp and clean, with little sign of splatter or poorly formed characters in its 600dpi output. Colour print is also clean, but there's a slight fuzziness with black text on coloured backgrounds. This is a little surprising, as the printer uses HP's much heralded ColorSphere toner, which should offer "better flow onto the page". Colour rendition is fair, though colours still looked too intense in our photo test piece and there was loss of detail in darker areas.

So, to the all important running costs. The Color LaserJet 1600 takes four drum/toner cartridges and HP considers the transfer belt a lifetime component. The cartridges are rated at 2,500 pages for black and 2,000 pages each for cyan, magenta and yellow and cost around £50 each, depending on source. Amazon was the cheapest source we could find.

This gives print costs of 2.49p for a black page and 10.60p for colour. Comparing that with other colour lasers in the same price range, the Color LaserJet comes out higher than either the Canon LaserShot LBP5200 or the Samsung CLP510. In the case of the Samsung, it costs nearly 3p more per colour page. This puts it near the top of the cost bracket for sub-£250 colour lasers. You might expect consumables to drop in price as a printer moves further into its sales life (this is the first UK review of the Color LaserJet 1600), but this printer uses the same consumables as the Color LaserJet 2600, which has already been around for a while.