HP 550C - the true original! (HP Deskjet 600)

Member Name: r_welfare

Product:	HP Deskjet 600
Date:	22/03/03 (291 review reads)
Rating:

Advantages: Dirt cheap, goes on forever

Disadvantages: Can't produce pinsharp pictures, ugly old thing, takes up a lot of desk space

I bet if you've been around computers for a while you know exactly what a "traditional" Hewlett-Packard Deskjet 500 printer looks like. That's right, a big, beige housebrick. They weren't pretty in the old days (just pretty pricey) but got the job done.

In the early 90's most people used dot-matrix printers (remember them?) that used to rattle your house windows in operation, but after a while certain companies (notably Canon) began to offer low-cost inkjet printers that were whisper-quiet by comparison. They were also capable of much better quality. However, throughout this time HP were offering their Deskjet 500 to the public and while it was generally too expensive to all but the most voracious home user, it quickly found steady business with companies, schools and colleges.

In the mid-90's HP turned it's back on this great pioneer and started offering the Deskjet 600, the portable 310, and numerous variations thereon. All of which used the standard Deskjet 500 mechanicals, but were slightly easier on the eye. Now, unfortunately they didn't think things through too well and as such these models have a reputation for eating paper and generally behaving badly (particularly those that feed the paper through vertically using the power of gravity).

No such issues beset the 500. The model I still use in the 550C. This was at the top end of the range at the time - the standard 500 was a black-and-white machine, while the 500C allowed colour printing, but only held one ink cartridge at a time. As such if you left the colour cartridge in all the time, it would combine all the colours to produce "black" and quickly run out. The 550C got around this by allowing the printhead to be fed by two cartridges at once, a colour one and a dedicated black one. So you got the best of both worlds.

I picked this one up about five or six years ago for £50, and it still does sterling service today. Sure,
the graphical resolution isn't great, but it's quiet, efficient, and gets the job done reliably and smoothly. I know that with most colour inkjet printers starting from as little as £50 today there may be no place for the 550C than in a landfill site, but if you can pick one up cheap it'll be a reliable and sturdy friend for many years to come - the Volvo of inkjet printers, if you will!

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