Fair price for budget SOHO printer (HP Deskjet 840c)

Member Name: Plymyphil

Product:	HP Deskjet 840c
Date:	07/12/03 (802 review reads)
Rating:

Advantages: Durability, Reliability

Disadvantages: Photos, Speed

Please scroll down to see thie review with capital letters intact.

















I?ve had my Deskjet 840C for two years now. I purchased it when Windows XP drivers for my Lexmark printer behaved in a strange way and needed reinstalling often. The deskjet is from the Hewlett Packard printer stable and as such comes with a reputation for quality. I paid £129.99 for mine at PC World in Plymouth. I doubt these are available from new now so you would expect to pay between £30 and £40 for a decent quality second hand model.

Let?s take a tour of the features of this printer and see how it copes with a couple of years of home use.

DESIGN
This is from the pre-curve days where boxy was in and beige was not so much the new black as the only colour available. That said, the design is adequate on any but the most fashion conscious users desk. The only observation of possible complaint is the footprint. For a budget colour inkjet printer this is a reasonably large footprint. The front of the printer is simple in design containing just two buttons, standby and paper out. There is a third LED that signifies low ink. The printer takes two ink cartridges which although standard now was not always common in printers of this age. This means that if you print in black, you are not burning through the colour cartridge. The combined colour cartridge though is perhaps a design flaw in that a few pages of one colour would wipe out the full colour ink cartridge.

SPECIFICATION
This is the dull bit really but it is important I share some of the specification with you. I won?t bore you with everything on the box, just the edited highlights with my opinion on whether the claimed feature is accurate.
The printer claims that for black and white printing the rates of print are eight pages per minute draft, 4.6 pages per minute normal mode and 4 pages per minute in best. I say this is f
airly optimistic. This is a slow printer compared to any colour inkjet. Standard pages of tabulated text in word come out at about a page and a half to two pages per minute on normal mode.
In colour the printer claims are reduced and slightly more accurate. I don?t dispute the 0.8 pages per minute in best mode but the five pages per minute it claims for draft I would say is out by about three pages!
The paper tray has a 100 sheet capacity which is fine for SOHO use although some people with business use may claim this as insufficient for their needs. I guess if this was insufficient for your needs you would probably be looking at laser technology anyway as offering better value for money.
The printer is capable of printing to a range of media including: paper (plain, inkjet, and photo), envelopes, transparencies, labels, cards, hp premium media and iron-on transfers. I have primarily used the cheapest A4 paper, transparencies and occasionally photo paper. The print quality has been acceptable on all of these media.
The resolution is a claimed 600dpi but this is making use of the HP technology RET. (Resolution Enhancement Technology I believe.) This makes a lower resolution look higher by doing some clever tricks. The effect is perfectly acceptable and I have shared photos printed on photo paper with friends. The colour saturation on these is poor compared to printers with more recent technology but as I said, perfectly acceptable especially when you consider the price.

CARTRIDGES
The printer takes one black and one tri-colour cartridge. The prices of these cartridges are high in my opinion for the use that you receive from them. The standard cartridges hold 40ml ink and really don?t consider any of the price effective stickers on the 12 and 15ml cartridges because it is bunkum. The ink is expensive ? period. A black and colour cartridge from PC World, not the cheapest place but one of the most convenient, leaves you with little change fr
om fifty quid!

DURABILITY
Well, two years on and literally thousands of pages later the printer still seems to be working every bit as well as on day one. (Shouldn?t tempt fate like this I know.) I have been quite pleased with the quality. There are two times I hanker for better. The first is on a Monday morning when loose sheets of paper printed at the weekend get rain splattered to and from the car. This ink smudges beautifully when wet. The second time is when looking at photos compared to those produced by our colour laser printer at work (review to follow) which really knocks spots of any inkjet for saturation of colour and depth of tones.

OVERALL
I have had my money?s worth and have been more than satisfied with the quality and reliability. I wouldn?t pay the price I paid then now because technology has developed but for £40 or less second hand I would definitely consider one of these for home use. Certainly ideal if the children are pumping school work out at a great rate of knots as it is relatively cheap to buy and totally simple to get connected and running.

Summary: