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Despite the fact that the company has a wide range of products, I always regard the name of Hewlett Packard as being synonymous with printers. Even though I have written about the company's laptops, scanners, desktop systems and its latest LightScribe initiative, if somebody was to ask me how to describe the company in one word, the answer would be "Printers". Recently I have been checking out the company's Business Inkjet 1000 model.

Although there are a number of inkjet printers around that are less demanding in regards to space, I must admit that the rather solid appearance of this printer is rather re-assuring. Its clean looks help alleviate any initial concerns that may arise from its dimensions of 495 x 411 x 215mm (W x D x H) - the actual footprint is slightly less as these dimensions include the protruding paper tray.

Setting up the printer is relatively straightforward although it does throw up one anomaly. The Hewlett Packard concept is to provide separate print heads and ink cartridges. With the Inkjet 1000 there are four ink cartridges and four print heads which have to be inserted individually. This process should cause no problems if you keep your wits about you. First the ink cartridges have to be inserted into the appropriate coloured slots followed by the print heads. However, for reasons which are beyond me, Hewlett Packard has chosen to arrange the print head line up in a different order to that of the ink cartridges. The print heads are arranged in Cyan, Black, Magenta and Yellow order, while the ink cartridges are lined up as Black, Cyan, Magenta and Yellow

See also: Inkjet printers

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Once the various cartridges and print heads are in position and the paper tray is loaded the power lead can be attached. At this point the printer automatically carries out a quick print test. If everything is OK then you can install the provided drivers and attach the printer via a USB lead which you have to provide. Options are available to set up the printer as a solo or network device. I did notice that the printer was carrying out various operations it felt were necessary as the software was being installed. At the conclusion of the software installation you can attach the USB lead and print out a further test sheet if you wish.

On the front of the printer is a control panel. This houses buttons to turn the printer on/off plus cancel and resume operations. Various lights on the panel provide feedback as to the printer's status and possible problems such as "out of paper" or the need to check the print heads or ink cartridges. The input paper tray can store up to 150 sheets and can handle envelopes, cards, transparencies and labels of varying weights and sizes.

With its 96MHz process, 8MB of RAM and 4MB of ROM, the Inkjet 1000 is rated at 23 ppm in monochrome and 18ppm colour in draft mode. These figures drop to 3ppm for both monochrome and colour when quality is boosted to the highest level. Of course these figures are based on the minimal industry-standard of 5% coverage. For my more realistic tests I used a 332 word document for monochrome printing and an 81.8Kb, 800 x 600 24-bit colour image for colour printing. A single copy of the document took 8 seconds while eight copies of the same document took 62 seconds. The colour image took 18 seconds in standard mode and slowed down to 105 seconds when printing in photo quality. All the timings were from the moment printing started until the paper was ejected.

I was particularly impressed with the text printing. Colour images were reasonable but nothing outstanding. The estimated yield of the ink cartridges is up to 1,750 pages at 5% and the print heads should be good for up to 16,000 pages for black and up to 24,000 pages for colour.

Priced at around £100, this printer will run on all versions of Windows and Mac OS 9.1 and later. It is more suitable for those who will be concentrating on printing documents with just occasionally diversions into photo printing territory.  

Link to the HP website, where the InkJet 1000 is currently available for £79+VAT