If your company makes you use one of these – leave! (HP Deskjet 610c)

Member Name: Caroline R

Product:	HP Deskjet 610c
Date:	12/12/00 (114 review reads)
Rating:

Advantages: Cheap & compact,

Disadvantages: Slow & noisy

Until this summer, I worked for the sort of multi-million pound company which would employ Shakespeare, give him a bottle of ink and refuse to fork out for a quill. You had to be there for ten years before you got your own Tippex. I could probably name the said business, in fact, because no-one there will be reading this – the company was so tight it wouldn’t even let anyone have the internet.
Anyway, my role as Marketing Assistant was to design the company’s product literature – and then print out ALL the copies on an HP610C printer. Therefore, the sales reps had the embarrassment of handing out flimsy bits of A4 paper sodden with inkjet ink while all the competitors were flashing glossy brochures. It didn’t matter – customers did not feature very highly in this company’s priorities.

The HP610C was hopelessly inadequate for the job – but that’s probably because it wasn’t designed for churning out 1000 colour copies every week. It was painfully slow, had poor resolution and was noisy. It was also by far the cheapest colour printer on the market, which was what it all came down to. This printer is what Bob Cratchett would be expected to use if he were alive today.

Surprisingly, I am actually going to recommend the 610C, because if it is used for its intended purpose, it has a lot of advantages. First of all, as I said, it is cheap. For a home PC, especially one used by children, this is a good way of getting a piece of equipment which is inexpensive but still offers the fun option of colour printing. It is compact and lightweight, doesn’t jam very often, the paper is simple to load and the cartridges are easy to change. On the downside, it is pretty slow and noisy, but this doesn’t necessarily matter in a home environment. It also has an annoyingly wide print margin on one of the short sides of the paper, so experimentation is necessary if you have a document which needs to
be precisely centred.

So, although the HP610C has the honour of being one of the factors that made me quit my job with nothing else to go to, I’d still say that it (and the newer version, the 640C) is a good first printer which is cheap, cheerful, and perfectly adequate for a home PC. Just don’t let your tight-wad boss palm you off with one.

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