HP DeskJet 895Cse Color Ink Jet (HP Deskjet 890C)

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Product:	HP Deskjet 890C
Date:	04/07/00 (86 review reads)
Rating:

Advantages: Fast

Disadvantages: Not Cheap

If you are looking for a high-performance color ink jet printer for personal, small office, or workgroup use, the HP DeskJet 895Cse is a very good choice. The quality of printed text, graphics, and photos is stunning for an ink jet. Add the flexibility of both Universal Serial Bus (USB) and Centronics interfaces, a good selection of software, the economy of separate black and color cartridges, and duty cycle of 3,000 pages/month and you have printer which fits just right in the small office environment.

PACKING. The 895 comes in a rugged cardboard box with thick styrofoam packing. It looks like it will take a lot of shipping abuse.

ITEMS INCLUDED.

User's Guide
Two Posters - "Parallel Printer Setup" and "USB Setup for Windows 98"
Power adapter and power cord
CD with drivers and bonus software
Black and tri-color ink cartridges
PHYSICAL. The 895C is a pretty thing. The plastic is fairly solid stuff, somewhat more so than that used in many ink jets I've seen. The tray assembly and lift-up lid over the print mechanism look like they will take more punishment than the average ink jet out there. The head assembly is solid, simple, and easy to get at. The pint head positioning belt is wider than many I've seen. You can really look into the printer from the front--lots of space. There is a large, easy-to-remove door, with paper rollers at the rear, which combined with the access afforded at the front, should make clearing a paper-jam quite easy. Although I haven't had the opportunity (or need) yet, I would guess servicing this printer would be much easier than many I've worked on.

INSTALLATION. Installation was very simple using just the posters: unpack, remove packing tape and restrainers, connect cable, pug-in power adapter, insert print cartridges, load paper, turn on the computer, insert the CD and install the software when prompted by Windows when it det
ects the printer. I had no problems when installing the printer to use a parallel printer interface. When I first installed the USB interface the printer would quit after printing a page with a Windows 98 error stating that printer was not ready. It turns-out that the printer's USB driver is not directly compatible with the VIA MVP chip set on the Epox Super7 motherboard in my test machine, specifically the VT82C586B chip. Fortunately, VIA had a fix for the problem called the USB Filter Driver. Once I downloaded and installed the driver the printer USB'd just fine.

Cartridge installation is really quite simple: take a cartridge out its box, remove the tape over the print head, lift the cover over the printer assembly (the head assembly then moves to the center of the printer where it is easy to get at), lift the blue lever on top appropriate cartridge bay, lower the cartridge into the bay, and secure it by snapping the lever in place--a no brainer and no mess. Putting paper in the printer is even simpler--no fidgeting is required to fill the well-designed, 100-sheet tray.

SOFTWARE. The HP Printing Essentials for Home and Office CD includes:

Printer Drivers and Software.
Office In Color? - a collection of add-ons for MS Office, including color creation tools and over 200 templates for Word and Excel for creating business reports, newsletters, etc.
PhotoRecall? - resembles a computerized photo album and is used to store, catalog, and retrieve images.
HP FontSmart with 145 fonts.
HP Instant Delivery - software and a free service which gathers condensed versions of publications and Web sites and prints to your printer at times you choose.
HP Web PrintSmart - allows you to retrieve multiple web pages, format them with style sheets, etc. and print them as a single document.

OPERATION. The 895C is quiet and fast. Surprisingly, I found the printer actually prints a little faster through the pa
rallel interface than it does through the USB interface. HP rates the printer at 10 PPM (pages per minute) in the EconoFast mode (which, by the way, produces very good text). I clocked it somewhat slower at 1 Min. 20 Sec. for 10 pages of typical text, or 8 PPM. Still, that's very fast for an ink jet printer. HP rates the printer at 5 PPM in the normal mode. My trusty HP LaserJet II, which is over 12 years old, and is rated at 6 PPM prints the same 10-page text document in 1 min. 37 seconds or 6.2 PPM. In the normal mode the 895 prints those ten pages in 2 min. 9 sec or 4.7 PPM. It is probably possible to create a 10-page document which will print faster on the 895.

PRINT QUALITY. The 895C achieves excellent print quality with several techniques. First, lines and text are made sharper by using a combination of different sized dots along edges. Second, a greater range of colors are created by layering up to 16 drops of ink into single dot to produce more than 250 color shades. Furthermore, by arranging the drops within a dot, an overall perceived color range of more than 16 million colors is obtained. This is known as half-toning: adjacent drops of different colors are perceived by the brain as a combination of the colors when looking at a dot or dots. You can read more about this at HP's PhotoREt II site.

The results are that text looks like it came out of a laser printer. In fact, under a magnifying glass, I can see no difference at all. Lines are sharp and without jaggies--they appear a little grainy under a magnifying glass and smooth without magnification. Color printing is stunning. Even on plain paper I can see the capacitors inside the CPU socket of a picture of socket 7 motherboard and the individual holes in the socket. A print-out of a photo of the Corvette found on the Corel CD's approaches a photograph on photo paper. However, this paper costs about a buck per sheet retail! On plain paper there was some blu
r and shadowing in places; but, overall, it is better than you would see in most newspapers, but not as good as you would see in magazine printed on quality, glossy paper.

BOTTOM LINE. The 895 is not a cheap or mid-range ink jet printer. Considering its performance, the quality of the print, the cost over it's lifetime, I think it is well worth the street-price of about $400.00, if you need color--I've seen far too many lesser printers end-up in the trash can after a year or two of use. Otherwise, at this price, I would opt for a mid-range laser printer.

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