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HP Officejet 6000
by brinkk
This was at first the most annoying printer I have ever bought. The setup took 15 minutes and the back of this thing turned into a serious rats nest. The manual was helpful but did not provide diagrams. But one after it has been set up, it is probably the most practical printer.
this however is the only fault because what it ... lacks in setup and ease of installation is made up or in the efficiency and also the value for money. It is highly economical, something in the range of A, or B efficiency, and because it uses LEDs and has an auto off function for power saving, it won't cost much to run.
There is also an ink economy setting on your computer that will work with this. It can print fast economy, fast normal or fast draft. It can also print in greyscale to a high standard. It says it takes up to 250 sheets but this is seriously not recommended. I have tried putting 200, 50 less than it can hold, and it just jammed because it wanted to feed in two sheets to print at once.
It has lasted a long time and in the two years I have had it the whole ink jet row has been caked in dried ink and dust, yet when cleaned it worked perfectly. It's a fantastic printer, and I will not be buying another anytime soon. I know everyone says this but this really is the best value printer today. It is cheap to buy, and even cheaper to run for both electricity and ink supplies.
For accuracy when printing it is perfect. Here is a small margin problem when printing from a webpage because pictures and adverbs can be cut off by a giant White block, which did not happen on my old printer, but printing word documents, it will align the margins perfectly. So this is more recommended for those who print from word rather than a webpage.
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HP Deskjet 6940
by valve90210
I work as a print designer and as such I have to prepare a lot of photographs for printing, making sure the exposure is ok, brightening dark areas, etc etc. Once I have done this it is nice to be able to print out a copy to see how it prints as well as being able to see it on my screen.
In the office there are two printers I ... can print to, one is an Oki laser printer, the other was a an aging HP inkjet printer.
The laser produces printouts which are wildly inaccurate; everything is far too yellow and even with endless amounts of tweaking print settings, colour settings etc etc, I have never been able to produce any kind of accuracy with it. I accept that it isn't really designed for such things as it is an office printer and hence better suited to printing out numerous copies of letters and spreadsheets.
The aging inkjet printer however was great, it would spit out (rather slowly admittedly) some very accurate colours that matched my screen and indeed very closely matched the results we would get back from the commercial printing press once we got work back from them.
To get to this nice accurate output I had to do a little tweaking with colour settings but they made a good difference each time and after not too long I was getting accurate prints (unlike with the laser). However I got a new computer with Windows Vista and sadly it being an aging printer, there was driver for Vista. The only option was a generic driver which gave me no control over colours and was very limited in what settings it would let me change.
I spoke to the IT department who were happy to purchase me a new printer that would work with Vista. Excellent I thought and began researching something would give me nice accurate colours and allow me a lot of control over how the prints came out. I was finding various options and weighing up which would be best, when IT called and informed me they had ordered me a printer and it would be with me the next day.
Naturally I looked up the model they had ordered, the HP Deskjet 6940, the reviews I read said it was nice and fast and produced good quality photos, however there were some negative comments about the colours it produced.
When the printer arrived, I was initially impressed with it, it's quite a nicely built piece of kit and while it won't win any design awards - it is essentially a silvery box - it looks quite nice on the desk with it's very in trend brushed metal look casing, with contrasting charcoal grey plastic for buttons and detailing.
At the back of the printer are the power connector (a proprietary cannon socket rather than a standard 3-pin or figure of 8 connector) and the USB socket. On the front of the printer there is a small section for all the buttons, of which there are 4, a power button, an x button, an eject button and one which I have to admit I've never used and don't really know what it's for. There is also a USB slot on the front for plugging in either a Bluetooth dongle for printing photos over bluetooth, or for directly connecting a camera for pictbridge printing (neither of which I have ever used). The sides of the printer have no connectors or button or anything such like.
Sticking out of the front of the printer is the paper tray which holds a reasonable amount of paper as well as allowing the loading of envelopes and photo paper of typical 6 x 4 photo size. There is also a pull out guide for the print outs to collect.
The front of the printer lifts up to allow changing of the rather tiny ink cartridges.
Installing the printer as is normally the way these days, was a fairly simple affair, just a case of running the software from the disk included with the printer then connecting the printer up - which reminds me there was no USB cable included with the printer, whether this is standard or just the case from the suppliers the IT Deparment use I don't know but it's worth checking out to save disappointment.
Naturally I immediately printed out a couple of test photographs to see what the quality and speed of printing were like.
Speed wise I was very impressed with the printer, it spat out an A4 full colour print in something like 10 seconds, a huge improvement on the old printer I had which took about 2 minutes for a similar sized photo.
The colours were very vivid and bright and would be pleasing to most people I'm sure, however this was not what I wanted, I was after accurate colours, not something that would look nice in my photo albums.
I spent a couple of hours tinkering with the printer driver colour settings but still could not get it to print accurately. By the time I had finished I had a stack of photos printed out, none of which were anything like matching what I was seeing on my screen, and ink cartridges which were now practically empty.
Since getting the printer I have played with the colour settings on several occasions but have never managed to get anything accurate from it, it seems as though it is intended to make your photos lovely and vibrant as you remember things rather than being accurate, this for me is a real problem and as such the printer sits under a pile of paper on my desk virtually unused.
Before anyone mentions that it might be my monitor that is the problem and displaying things incorrectly, I have to say the monitor is fine as it is calibrated using an optical colorimeter.
For the home user this is probably a pretty decent printer, however, for my uses it is just not accurate enough.
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HP Officejet 7000 Wide Format Printer
by thingymabob
This is a great printer if you need to work with A3 size prints at home, however for business use I wouldn't recommend this product as I would consider the printing speed to be a little inadequate for that type of setting.
That said it is a great printer, the quality is amazing and the speed isn't too bad considering it is an ... ink jet device, I use it for printing scans of A3 designs and it prints off all the tiny pencil written detail of notes perfectly, this of course requires that the original source is of high quality but basically if the file on the screen has a mark on it, then this printer will put it onto paper, however small.
For this reason alone I would mark this printer as being great, however it isn't cheap. I got mine for £200 and from the little research I have done there doesn't seem to be many available at anything much less than £185. That is quite steep for a printer, especially one that isn't completely suitable for office use but like I said it is excellent quality and does cater for A3 requirements, which is actually quite rare in modern printers.
As for refills the ink seems to last quite a while, and when you do need to refill you can do it for around £40, and even cheaper if you live near a discount refill store. So there isn't too much extra cost involved there, which to me kind of weighs out the original high cost.
Overall this is a great printer that prints in HQ and can work with A3 paper, however it is slightly too slow for business use and isn't the cheapest product on the market. Therefore I give it four stars out of five. Which is still an excellent rating!
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