Most inkjet printers tend to be smaller than their laser cousins. Not so with this Business Inkjet offering from Hewlett Packard. However big does not always mean expensive.
It is 51x46x21cm and not insubstantial weight wise at close to ten kilos. The d stands for duplex something not that often found with inkjets. One thing in its favour is that as paper is loaded face down in the base of the unit and delivered face up onto a shelf on top of the paper tray no access will normally be required at the rear or top of the unit so a substantial shelf should be fine.
You are unlikely to mistake it for an ordinary inkjet as the ink cartridges (4) and the print heads (4) are separate and even are inserted into different spaces within the printer. Unlike some printers the cartridges are reasonably sized 28ml for the three colours ones and 69ml for black.
Print speeds are excellent until you look to see what is claimed I managed to get 16PPM in draft mode and this was with proper pages and not just 200 word nonsense offerings. For photos it was okay, quality was good but even though to me it is less important speed was not that great, with an A4 page that had four 13x9cm images took 450 seconds to print. However on plain paper it seems to redeem itself taking around 30 seconds for a full colour A4 print however there was some slight banding.
It comes with 32MB of memory a leap up from what was the default of 16MB. I connected via USB2 (will work with USB 1.1) but there is still a bi directional parallel port should you prefer it.
Now the item that is often an extra if available at all duplex, here it sits like a bunion on the rear of the unit. A nice extra but as always with duplex the second side seems to print a little lower around 4mm in my tests and printing speeds were decimated, as an example a two page brochure took 30 seconds longer to print using duplex.
There are four push buttons and indicators for the four ink cartridges on the front of the unit, it took me a while to get used to the on/off button being the second from the left. In use the unit is very quite no doubt some European doctrine on office noise but especially when printing in other than draft or fast normal modes it is close to silent. When printing photos I needed to put my ear to it to be sure it was printing at all!
If space is not a problem then this reasonably priced offering is certainly worth consideration. As stated a strong shelf would be ideal as there is no normal reason to need to access the rear or top of the unit. As a business unit using 'fast normal' it is nippy for both text and graphics. In 'best' mode graphics are slow.
The link given also shows a number of HP partners and currently the cheapest is www.dabs.com at £96.97 + VAT a total of £113.93.
http://h10010.www1.hp.com/wwpc/uk/en/sm/WF06b/5043-5047-5287-5287-1325417-7368033-10018905.html
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