Space age printer! (HP Deskjet 5550)

Member Name: richard_richard

Product:	HP Deskjet 5550
Date:	07/11/04 (2201 review reads)
Rating:

Advantages: Speed, Quality of print, Sleek design

Disadvantages: The consumables are expensive!

Pre-ramble
This review is of the Hewlett Packard Deskjet 5550 printer. This printer has been available on the market now for about a year, so is still a relatively modern deskjet printer. The HP 5550 has a decent size memory and specification, and also has interesting styling. People round here say these printers look a bit like a mini spaceship!

We have been using a number of these inkjet printers at the company I work for, probably for about a year now

I’m not sure if these printers are still available, as I believe the HP 5800 series has been the direct replacement for them. Still, if you can find a HP 5550 printer for sale, I expect you would pay around £110.



What’s in the box?
The 5850 printer comes in a medium sized box and is supplied with the following:

One printer
Power pack and plug
Installation disk
Instruction manual
Quick start instruction sheet
Two toners



Specifications
The HP 5500 printer is designed for A4 paper. The manufacturers suggested page per minute output times are as follows:

17ppm – black normal
12ppm – colour normal

This printer has a decent sized memory of 8MB, which should be sufficient for most print jobs that are thrown at it!

The print resolutions on this printer are pretty impressive. In black and white mode it will run at a maximum of 1200 x 1200 dpi, and in the best colour mode, 4800 x 1200 dpi. The HP 5550 model is also equipped with HP’s image enhancement technology, “PhotoREt III”. This technology is designed to make photos and images look as realistic as possible.

This printer allows you to connect a Parallel cable or use a USB cable. In my experience the USB option is slightly quicker and is also easier to use the Plug and Play install option, if you are using Windows XP or 2000.

The printer will run on Windows XP, 2000, NT4, 95, 98 and ME. It will also support most of the newer Apple Mac operating systems.

The printer has a very “space age” style design. As mentioned above, its slightly circular design makes it look like some sort of flying saucer! It is mostly silver in colour, with a see-through black front flap. This can be lifted in order to gain access to the toner cartridges.

The operating controls on the HP 5550 are situated on the front of the printer, on a panel on the right hand side. From the top of the panel downwards, the controls are as follows: a Cancel button, a Page Feed button and finally the On/Off button. Also, situated below the Cancel button is an indicator light that becomes illuminated when the printer is running low on ink.



Test Drive
I decided to connect the printer directly to a computer using a Parallel cable and then a USB cable in order to test it out. Using a parallel cable, the printer responded to print jobs pretty quickly. However, using the USB cable it seemed to me that the printer reacted faster to print jobs, so I decided to stick with this connection option.

Fitting the toners into the printer was very straightforward. Lifting the front flap, the toner bays are moved automatically across by the printer, allowing you to fit the toner cartridges. As with most of the new HP Deskjet designs, each toner is held in a small box covered by a plastic lever. To insert a new toner, these levers just need to be lifted up, and then the toner is placed in the box and then the lever is pushed down to hold the toner in place.

Filling up the printer with paper (the tray will hold 150 sheets) I was then ready to send some different print jobs to test out the speed and quality of the printer.

Testing the print speed of the printer, I tried out normal black printing with a letter. On sending the print job, the printer reacted very quickly. The letter was printed out at a good rate, and I could see how this printer would be able to push out about 17 pages in a minute.

The sharpness and crispness of the printed text on the letter was impressive. The normal output for this printer is 600 x 600 dpi and this resolution should be adequate for most people’s needs.

Moving onto colour printing, I decided to print out some images from Word’s clipart catalogue. Choosing a couple of fairly complex pictures, I inserted these into Word and then send the print job to the printer at the best quality setting.

The print speed this time was obviously a fair bit slower, as the printer had to deal with much more complex images to render and at higher resolutions. Once the print job was finished, I inspected the printer’s output and was impressed by the results. The print quality was sharp and clear, and the colours were accurate without any smudging or fuzziness.

Although printing at the best setting will obviously give you the best quality, it is worth remembering that this setting will also use up your ink at a pretty furious rate, so it may be best to save this setting for special occasions! I would think that the normal colour setting, 1200 x 1200 dpi, should be more than enough for most of your colour print jobs.

In terms of reliability, we have been using these printers in the office for about a year and have not experienced any problems with them. As with the majority of Hewlett Packard printers, the reliability of the product is usually something you can count on, and that seems to be no exception when it comes to these HP 5550 printers.



Conclusion
Overall this is a good quality printer that fulfils a useful role for either an office or home computer system.

The printer is quick, produces very good quality images, and if you are able to still find one for sale, you should be able to pick it up for a very reasonable price. Well worth seeking out!

Thanks for reading!

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