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General Performance
Warm-up (3.28)
Warm-up time for the Color LaserJet 3600n is 99 seconds, somewhat more than other laser printers. The Konica Minolta Magicolor 2430DL, the laser printer in our office warmed up in 45 seconds. The Lexmark X342n, a black-and-white laser in our testing labs, was ready to go in 48 seconds.
Power Usage (4.06)
HP’s specs list the Energy Star compliant printer as using 335 watts when active, 48 watts when ready, 12 watts when sleeping, and only a half-watt when turned off. Our tests revealed that, as expected, the 3600n is a power hog, like all laser printers. Startup brought power use up to 819 watts, which slowly worked its way down into 100s while the printer ran though its calibration cycle. However, our results also show a lower Ready mode power usage of 26 watts than the HP specs, with occasional spikes to 61 for no obvious reason. As with our other power tests, we use a wattage meter to measure how much power a printer draws when printing a page. The HP 3600n drew between 300 and 911 watts of power, an average of 606 watts. This is higher by orders of magnitude than other printers we have tested but because we have not tested another printer in the 3600n’s class we cannot draw cogent comparisons here. When going through self-cleaning, the HP 3600n drew between 100 and 858 watts of power, an average of 379 watts. As with our printing power tests, we are unable at this time to draw accurate comparisons as the other printers we have tested do not fall into this class.
Document Speeds (7.87)
HP’s published test speeds of 17 pages per minute (ppm) were not achieved during our testing regiment. However, our tests were run at the printer’s highest quality whereas manufacturer tests are usually run at draft or normal quality. Still, times were pretty quick, at 12.4 ppm for black-and-white text and 15 ppm for color documents. Print times slowed a bit in energy saver mode with 12 ppm for black text and 13.85 for color documents.
Comparable printers, such as the Lexmark and Brother models mentioned earlier, had greater manufacturer reported speeds, which would be explained by their faster processors. It’s unclear why HP did not include a zippier processor in this unit, especially considering the price.
Document Quality
Text (7.00)
The text produced by the HP 3600n was very sharp and crisp. The comparison below shows it alongside two other laser printers. The image on the left is text printed with the Lexmark X342n, and on the right, the Oki C6000n text is displayed. Results are very closely aligned, but we have to give the best clarity score to the HP 3600n.
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Lexmark X342n
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HP CLJ 3600n
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Oki C6000n
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Graphics (6.00)
Colr text and graphics were somewhat muted and lacked punch in our test PDF printed on the HP CLJ 3600n. That said, contrast was not pumped up like on other laser printers, such as the Oki C6000n.
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