Speed King! (HP Deskjet 5850)

Member Name: richard_richard

Product:	HP Deskjet 5850
Date:	03/11/04 (1200 review reads)
Rating:

Advantages: Very quick, Good image quality, Sleek design

Disadvantages: Could be supplied with USB cable

Pre-ramble
The Hewlett Packard Deskjet 5850 printer is one of the latest inkjet printers on the market. These little printers are slick, quick and definitely look the part!

We have purchased a number of these printers at the company I work for. We are currently replacing our HP Deskjet 895 printers, which are getting on a bit now and starting to struggle. These 5850 models are definitely a superior printer to the old 895’s.

These printers are good value for money as you should be able to pick one up for around £120.



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

One printer
One print feeder accessory (for envelopes, letters, etc)
Installation disk
Network Cable
Instruction manual
Quick start instruction sheet
Two toners

I find it somewhat strange that HP have chosen to supply this printer with a network cable, but not a USB cable. If you want to link this printer directly to your computer, you have to go out and buy your own USB cable!

Surely HP can’t be thinking that every person who buys this printer will want to run it on a network??



Specifications
The HP 5850 is designed for A4 paper. The manufacturers suggested page per minute output times are as follows:

21ppm – black draft
7.7ppm – black normal
0.9ppm – black best
15ppm – colour draft
5ppm – colour normal
0.9ppm – colour best

This printer has a very good size memory for an inkjet printer, 16MB. This has to be the largest memory I’ve seen on an HP Deskjet!

The print resolutions on this printer are also very impressive. In black and white mode it will run at a maximum of 1200 x 1200 dpi, and in colour mode, 4800 x 1200 dpi. The printer is also equipped with HP’s image enhancement technology, “PhotoREt III”. All of this technology adds up to some very impressive quality of print output.

This printer has the following interface connections, USB and Ethernet. It seems that the days of the parallel port have gone, so if you are using an older computer you will need to get a USB card installed in order to connect to this printer.

The printer will run on all the latest Windows operating systems and also on NT4 and ’98. It will also support most of the newer Apple Mac operating systems.

The printer 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.

This printer has a number of controls on the front panel. On the far right is the On/Off button. Then situated on the left of the printer are a print cancel button, a print cartridge status light, a resume button and light and finally a network button and icon.

On the top of the printer is a Wireless Status light, yes, this printer can even run on Wireless 802.11b networking. Sadly I can’t test this out as our company does not have this technology on the network yet!



Test Drive
I decided to connect the printer directly to a computer using a USB cable in order to test it out.

Once plugged into the USB cable, my operating system, Windows 2000, detected that a new printer had been connected. All I then needed to do was insert the HP installation disk and install the HP5850 driver. After doing this the printer was then ready to accept print jobs from the computer. I should add that if you wish to, you can run the full installation program from the HP CD, which will give you extra programs and features to gain the full use from this printer.

Fitting the toners into the printer was very straightforward. Lifting the front flap, there is a small space on the right hand side of the inside of the printer where the toner cartridges sit. 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. Simple!

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.

I decided to first send just a basic one page letter using black text only and set to the Normal print quality on the printer. On sending the job, the response from the printer was almost instantaneous. This is probably due to the fast USB connection and the large memory of the printer, which allows it to process jobs very quickly.

Once the printer had started the job I was very impressed with the speed. Yes, this was only printing out a black text letter, but I was still surprised by how quickly the printer was able to complete the job. It took only about 15 seconds to complete the page.

On examining the letter, I was impressed by the sharpness of the text and the crispness of the imaging. On normal setting the output is 600 x 600 dpi and I would think that this is probably sufficient quality for most people’s letter print jobs.

Moving onto colour printing, I decided to try printing out a photo taken with a digital camera. First setting this to the Normal print quality, the print job was again processed by the printer quickly. This was not of course as quick a response time as the letter, as the job took more of the memory of the printer to process. Even so, I was still impressed with how little time it took to process the job. Once printing off, the 5850 whizzed away and was finished printing a half page photo within about 25 seconds. Again most impressive!

The image quality was very good, the colours were clear and well rendered, and the overall the photo was sharp and well detailed. I would imagine the quality would be even better on photo paper, rather than the photocopy stuff I was using!

Setting the printer to the maximum colour quality and then sending the photo as a print job again, the 5850 took a little while longer to think about the job. This time the print output was noticeably slower, as the printer was working harder to push out the best quality. I would estimate it took about 40 seconds to produce the image, which is still not bad going for the highest quality! Once again I was very impressed with the image quality, the photo was even sharper and detailed than before.

I would be tempted to print out colour on the Normal setting for most of the time as the quality isn’t that much lower than the Best setting, and you’ll also be saving yourself a bit more ink!

In terms of reliability, I would think that with the Hewlett Packard name, you should be assured of years of reliable use out of this printer. Of course only having just got these printers, I can’t comment on the reliability, but judging this from previous HP Deskjets, I would say that there is usually very little that goes wrong with them, apart from the odd paper jam!



Conclusion
Overall I have to say I am very impressed with this little printer. It is very quick, produces very good quality images, and is also very keenly priced at around £120.

If you are looking for a new inkjet printer, you should really check this HP 5850 out. It gets top marks from me!

Thanks for reading!

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