Total cost of ownership warning! (HP Deskjet 5550)

Member Name: mike0910

Product:	HP Deskjet 5550
Date:	20/07/03 (2318 review reads)
Rating:

Advantages: Excellent print quality, Autocalibration of cartridges, Automatic paper type detection

Disadvantages: Best quality is slow, Exorbitant cost of ink

I bought this printer about three months ago, based on some good reviews and a degree of brand loyalty to HP. My previous inkjet was an HP Deskjet 890C, which is a very reliable general purpose printer with reasonable running costs. The reason for upgrading was to get better quality photo prints from my digital camera. The 890C is almost adequate as a photo printer, but I wanted sharper, brighter, less grainy prints.

The 5550 has USB and parallel connections, and a smallish external power brick. Following tradition, no cables are supplied, but these days USB cables are cheap and easy to buy. The printer is a rather space-age design in silver paint and dark grey plastic. I am sure its appearance is a matter of taste, but I quite like it. The footprint is medium/large but the height is lower than most printers.

Build quality seems a little less solid than older Deskjets. In particular, the pull-out stop that prevents the paper from overshooting the output tray is flimsy, and the side guide in the paper tray is prone to move sideways as paper feeds through. This can lead to misfeeds if the guide is not repositioned occasionally, which is annoying, especially as my previous Deskjet had infallible paper feeding.

On the plus side everything works, and nothing has broken yet. Driver installation from the CD was a breeze, with almost no user intervention, and no problems at all. The well-written user-guide is on the CD, together with a product specification which ominously doesn't seem to mention ink consumption..

One of the best features of this printer is the autocalibration of the ink cartridges. You just clip them in and close the cover. The printer then prints a test page and calibrates itself using the blue light. An excellent feature, which makes it less of a chore to switch between black and photo cartridges. (It only takes two cartridges at a time: tri-color and black or tri-color and photo. More expensive
models with the same print engine do take all three ink cartridges at once.)

Another feature which I really like is the autodetection of paper type. Just leave the paper type set to automatic and the printer will examine the top sheet of the paper in the tray (at the start of each print job) with its paper sensor and work out the best driver settings for the paper you've loaded. I don't know exactly how it works, but a ghostly blue light is involved. Amazingly, it really does a good job.

So, how does it print? There are four print quality options: Best, Normal, Everyday, FastDraft. Best is very slow indeed, and is only really needed for photos. Normal is a good compromise for quality at reasonable speed. FastDraft is very quick and rather wobbly. These options are very well chosen and they all have their uses.

Black text is very black (using the dedicated black cartridge) and sharp, close to laser quality but not quite there. Although it benefits from good quality paper, for general purpose printing it is quite tolerant of cheaper grades.

Photos are exceptional (using the photo cartridge and the right paper). Very sharp and detailed with stunningly clean, accurate colours and very little of the grain previously associated with HP inkjet technology. (But I'm not saying they are better than Epson and Canon photo prints, I just don't have any way of comparing at present.)

To date, I've mainly used 'HP Premium Photo Paper Glossy', and 'Kodak Premium Picture Paper', both of which produce very good (and very similar) results. The Kodak paper is currently cheaper, and just as good - if not better - than the HP paper.

So I'm almost entirely won over by this printer. There is only one thing stopping me from giving it a rave review: running costs. Granted, you expect HP to sell you a cheap printer and then overcharge for the ink, but I wasn't prepared for the degr
ee to which they have pushed the envelope on their business model with this generation of inkjets.

The cartridges are very small and very expensive. HP claims that the small drop size and improved drivers reduce the amount of ink used, and that this justifies the smaller capacities. This may be partly true, but user experience is that the small cartridges don't last anywhere near as long as the large cartridges in the DJ890C.

In the first three months of owning the 5550, I've used £90 pounds worth of ink, and I don't have that many photos to show for it. I haven't costed the prints accurately, but I estimate the ink to cost about £1.50 per photo in best quality. This is just too expensive for anything but the occasional, exceptional, photo.

Sorry HP, you've blown it. I'm not spending many hundreds of pounds a year on your overpriced consumables. I'll keep the DJ890C for general purpose printing and use an internet/postal service for volume photoprints. And I'll use the 5550 as little as possible, which is a shame, because it's a superb printer.

And next time I buy a photo printer, it probably won't be an HP.

Summary: