Old Hat (HP Deskjet 640c)

Member Name: Galloway

Product:	HP Deskjet 640c
Date:	23/06/01 (227 review reads)
Rating:

Advantages: Cheap, Good Text

Disadvantages: Old Technology, Poor Graphics, Inferior to competition

The Hewlett Packard 640C printer is HP’s most basic inkjet and costs around £65.
It is a fairly bulky device with both the in and out paper trays at the front, so it takes up quite a bit of desk space.

The 640c connects easily to either your parallel port or to a USB port and comes with drivers on a CD. These install smoothly and are to Hewlett Packard’s usual high standard. They include features such as mirror and rotation and have some image manipulation tools, which is as well as a separate image editor was not supplied with the unit.

Cartridges clip into the print carriage with ease, a black one and a tricolour one. Both include integral print heads, which are replaced with the cartridges and are of large capacity, but are quite expensive to buy. The largest capacity ones costing around £25.

In operation the printer is fairly noisy and not very speedy, especially when printing images. But it’s not the slowest in the budget end of the market either.
Text quality is very good, crisp, clean and everything you would expect from a text printer, but images fail to make the grade. On plain paper they are seedy and on photo paper, even with the optional photo cartridge they are just as seedy and certainly cannot be classed as ‘photo quality’.

For a basic text printer, this offers good quality for a cheap price, but it is old technology and still relies on HP’s Colorsmart, rather than the far superior PhotoRet technology as used in HP’s newer models for image reproduction.
With far superior printers avaliable for not much more, there isn’t really any reason to buy this model.

Summary: