New HP deskjet 5550 (HP Deskjet 5550)

Member Name: MylesEdward

Product:	HP Deskjet 5550
Date:	18/04/03 (1397 review reads)
Rating:

Advantages: easy to install, great looking photo prints, fast printing

Disadvantages: small ink cartridges

Just bought the HP deskjet 5550 from Dabs (17/04/2003) as they were selling it for £62.27 including VAT and delivery as a limited time, special offer (still available I think) and I must say that it is an excellent printer.

Setting up was a breeze (I use Windows XP home edition) and everything worked straight out of the box. Followed the straight forward wizard on the setup disk which walks you through the setup and installation of the printer using either a USB cable or a parallel port cable, neither of which is supplied (cost me £2.50 to buy a USB cable. Seems a bit penny pinching on HP's part) and I was up and running first time with no effort at all. The printer is USB2 capable but runs fine on my machine which is only USB1.

The quality of the photo prints using standard cartridges (£15. 00 for the black and £26. 00 for the colour, both of which are supplied with the printer) on Fujifilm premium inkjet 270gsm glossy paper is as good as any I have seen, including some high range photo printers so I can not wait to get the photo cartridge (£20.00) to see the end results when using it.

Text documents and reports containing a mixture of text, clipart and graphs are excellent with no banding or bleeding that I could see, even using draft mode on 90 gm inkjet paper. The prints are so good that it hardly seems worth using the other settings for anything other than presentation documents. Even on standard white copier paper the quality of the print is excellent, wether it be text or clipart.

Add to this the fact that the 5550 looks nice, some would say cool (my seven year old son), does a limited selection of borderless photo prints (needs special paper), is very quite when printing, can be set to go into standby mode automatically after a preset time to save electricity and seems to be well built and you have a great all round inkjet printer.

You can buy an optional extra which allows automatic duplex (print on both si

des of the paper) printing at a cost of about £40. 00 from Dabs (it fits on to the rear of the printer)but as I have no real need for such a facility at the moment I think I'll just save the money.

I am comparing the HP 5550 directly with my old printer which was a HP 940c (which in itself was a very good printer) and it wins hand down as the quality of print is superior and the print speeds are much faster.

I will have to wait and see how it goes with the ink though as the cartridges are a tad on the small side and unlike the 940 you do not appear to be able to buy "recycled" cartridges for now but printing in draft mode mostly should help the ink to last that little bit longer (I hope). Hope this helps.

21/05/03.

Have since bought the colour cartridge and the difference in the reults when using it as against the tri-colour with the black as per usual are negligable. I would not recommend spending the money on the photo cartridge.

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