Trust the name of Hewlett Packard.... (HP Deskjet 840c)

Member Name: b-rokscarrie

Product:	HP Deskjet 840c
Date:	16/02/01 (100 review reads)
Rating:

Advantages: Reasonable price, high quality printing

Disadvantages: If I can't connect my Scanner again, the disadvantage is as above in the opinion!

I only received this printer today, but I'm so impressed with its qualities that I thought I would write straight away! We already have a Hewlett Packard CD-Rewriter which is extremely good and so I didn't hesitate when looking for the right brand of printer to get.

I needed a quality printer at a reasonable price and this one fits the bill. It was easy to install (with one small problem which I will come to later, hoping that someone can help me, actually!) and the leaflet/booklet gave easy to follow instructions. It is slightly wider than my previous Epson printer, so it will not fit in its normal place under the desk, meaning that I've had to switch a few things around a bit, but that's no big deal.

The print quality is amazing. As the dpi is quite high at 1200, printing out photos from my daughter's digital camera should (hopefully) be a dream. The colours are sharp and real, which makes a real difference to documents and pictures. I am a bit worried as to how long the cartridges last as they seem to be fairly expensive at around £24 from what I've seen, although I intend to shop around before purchasing any replacement cartridges.

...And the printer is so quiet compared to the Epson and it's predecessor the Lexmark (which came with the computer). I like the way you put a whole stack of papers at the front and it just feeds it in when required. On previous printers, it's taken me ages to align the paper only to find it still prints crooked! Plus I could never seem to be able to add more than a few sheets of paper at a time!

The only problem I have - as mentioned earlier - is this:

I connected using the parallel port as I didn't have a USB cable, but now, when I try to reconnect the Scanner (which wants one end of it's cable to be in the back of the computer instead of the printer being there) the printer won't work. (I put the end of the printer cable into the Scann
er as it was with our previous printer). When I try to print like this, I get a message saying that 'there was an error trying to print. Try again or wait for 5 seconds for printer to retry.' However many times I wait, it won't print. As soon as I take the Scanner out of the back of the Computer and reconnect the Printer cable there, it's fine, but of course I now can't use the Scanner. If anyone knows how to solve this problem I would be extremely grateful!

All in all, this printer is excellent value for money at the low to middle end of the price range. Hewlett Packard has a good reputation and I'm glad - even though it's early days of course - that I went for this particular model.

Summary: