HP Color LaserJet (Original)

What it was

The HP Color LaserJet (product number C3100A) was Hewlett-Packard's first color laser printer. It was introduced on September 19, 1994 at a list price of US$7,295, bringing desktop color laser output to a market that had previously relied largely on inkjet and thermal-transfer devices for color. The printer used a Konica print engine and shipped with 8 MB of upgradable memory and a standard paper tray (with an optional second tray).

Print method and technology

The Color LaserJet produced color through a four-pass electrophotographic process. For each page the photoconductor drum was exposed and developed four times—once for each of the cyan, magenta, yellow, and black (CMYK) toners—so four rotations of the drum were needed to build a full-color image. Output resolution was 300 dots per inch. Because color required four passes while black text needed only one, the printer was considerably faster in monochrome than in color; the color rate was about 2 pages per minute. (Sources differ on the black-and-white rate, citing either 8 or 10 ppm.)

Printer language and media handling

The model used PCL 5C, HP's color extension of the PCL 5 page-description language. HP had introduced PCL 5C in 1992 on the PaintJet XL300, HP's first color page printer, so the Color LaserJet adopted an existing color PCL rather than originating it; HP carried PCL 5C across its color product line. A landscape paper path allowed larger sheets—up to legal, 11x17, and A3—within a compact footprint. Color printing was limited to A4/letter-size media, while monochrome images could be printed on the larger A3/11x17 sizes. PostScript was not part of the original model's standard configuration, but HP offered it as an optional add-on—an Adobe PostScript Level 2 module (HP part C3112A)—for the C3100A.

Significance

The Color LaserJet marked the arrival of color laser printing on the desktop, moving the technology out of specialized corporate and mainframe environments. HP's engineering team described it as one of the company's most complex printer mechanisms, paired with a high-performance formatter. Contemporary sources reported an average cost per page of under 10 cents, competitive for color output of the era, though the HP Computer Museum notes that the quality of its color output was relatively poor and that most of HP's inkjet printers of the time could produce higher-quality color.

Place in the LaserJet line

The Color LaserJet followed HP's established monochrome LaserJet series, which had begun with the original LaserJet in 1984. It was succeeded in 1996 by the Color LaserJet 5 and 5M, which offered 1200-dpi-equivalent output through HP's Resolution Enhancement technology (RET), with the 5M adding PostScript and additional memory.

Limits of available documentation

Detailed factory specifications for this model are not fully preserved in accessible manufacturer archives. Figures such as physical dimensions, weight, standard interfaces, duplex capability, and supported operating systems are not confirmed here from authoritative sources and are therefore omitted rather than estimated. The monochrome print speed is reported inconsistently across sources (8 or 10 ppm), and no reliable discontinuation date was established beyond the 1996 arrival of the successor Color LaserJet 5 and 5M.