Top quality printer... (HP Deskjet 940c)

Member Name: The Duke

Product:	HP Deskjet 940c
Date:	17/12/01 (880 review reads)
Rating:

Advantages: Great quality, Quiet, Easy to install

Disadvantages: How much for the colour ink?

It was my dad's 60th birthday last week, and as my pressie to him, I bought him a printer for the PC my mum was going to buy him. Now, I knew he was going to be slightly annoyed with me because he already has a printer - an old HP DeskJet 550C, but seeing as one of the reasons he wants his own PC is because he's the chairman of a local charity fundraisers, and the current printer simply isn't up to scratch.

So, with a budget in mind of around £120, I went hunting around the Internet to see what was on offer. I was aiming primarily for a Hewlett Packard. I have one myself (a DeskJet 600C) and it's still going after around 8 years of use.

I was intrigued by the new-ish HP DeskJet 900 series - especially the brand new 950, but I didn't know if my dad?s new PC was going to have the required USB ports (a generic connection port that all manner of devices use to connect to your PC or Mac, and printers have started using these as well) instead of the old parallel ports.

So, instead I plumped for the slightly older (but still highly reviewed) 930C, which I knew for a fact, had the parallel port connection I was looking for. Saying that, I left it to the very last minute to go looking for it in the local shops here in Belfast, and while everyone sold them, and recommended them, no one had any in stock. Still, their prices were still within my price range (and not really and different from the Web) at around the £115 mark.

My friend suggested our local Curry's, but seeing as they were part of the Dixon's chain, I was wary.

"I'll go to have a look at all the nice gadgets" I told him "but they're not getting my money!"

So, in we went to Curry's. There, like a beacon shining on a dark night, in the middle of the PC department was a large display with a HP DeskJet 940C. The price? A paltry £99.99 inc. VAT! All morals went out the window. I took a closer look at it, an
d found that it supported both USB and standard parallel connections. What a result! I took both the printer, and a separate printer cable (HP printers, by default, don't come with a printer cable, although you can use your old one if you are upgrading your printer) to the checkout and arrived home a happy man.

So, on my dad's birthday, I presented him with his new printer.

"I've already got a printer" said the ungrateful sod.

"If you think you're running a charity with that, you've got another think coming to you" was my smart arse reply.

He didn't look happy. So, in the time-honoured tradition of a son trying to make his dad look like a fool, I set up his printer.

Printer set up is dead easy. Plug the cable (parallel or USB) into your PC, fill the tray with paper, plug the other end of your printer cable into the printer, and plug in the power pack to the printer and power socket. Turn on your PC, insert the required driver CD (this particular printer came with two driver CDs - one for Win95-2000/ME and one for Win XP), then sit back and watch the printer automatically set up for you.

Having set up my dad's printer, rather than print off a standard test page, I went into Word 2000 and knocked up a few paragraphs of text with some clip art and a photograph to show off all the capabilities. I then sneakily printed the same document off on his older printer).

Obviously I presented him with the 550C printout first. It was OK, and would do as a test printout, but you would never use it for proper, business use. I showed this to him. He was delighted.

"This is great!" he marvelled. I brought out the second printout and handed it to him.

"******* ****" Said my dad. "This is fantastic! How did you get this?"

I smugly told him what I'd done. He conceded that he was wrong, and that I was the font of all k
nowledge. (Actually, he gave me a cuff around the ear, but it's my story!)

Anyway, back to the printer. The first thing I noticed, apart from how easy it was to set up, was the fact that the thing is so quiet. If you have it sitting on a solid desk, you'd be hard pressed to hear it going, especially if you were in an office.

Print quality is outstanding, especially compared to the stone age printers we have in our house. Colours are bright and distinct in clip art, and in photos, the colours were perfect with no bleeding. (Bleeding is where too much ink goes onto the page, and it runs into other parts of the picture)

These prints were done on bog standard photocopier paper, and no doubt, results could be improved again with the use of higher quality paper from HP or photo paper, but you don?t really need the extra expense.

The printer comes with two ink cartridges - a black one and a tri-colour one. Both of these can be inserted into the printer at one time giving you proper blacks with full colour. The official specs state something like 12 pages per minute (ppm) for black printing and 10 in colour, but it doesn?t say if these are full graphics printouts or text only etc. I cannot verify if these figures are true, but I found the printer to be faster than my old HP DJ600C.

The printer can also take an optional accessory (i.e. you pay more for it) that enables you to print on both sides of a sheet of paper automatically, rather than you having to feed the paper through again. We do not have one, so I cannot give you price or performance details on this.

The build quality is very good with the printer feeling quite solid (not that I dropped it to test out my thoughts) and with the output being of very high quality, I hope that this printer can last as long as my old HP DJ 600 which would make it an absolute bargain.

A final note is this: there are two options for buying this printer - one is a bog
standard printer, and the other is exactly the same thing only with a Harry Potter CD included with software and clipart to use in making your own Harry potter cards etc. The prices of both these packages are identical.

Traditionally, the price of HP ink cartridges is quite expensive, and even for my old HP600, you'd be lucky to get a black cartridge for under £20. For example, today (17th December 2001) the cartridges for the 940C, which have been handily named 78 (for the colour) and 15 for the black to cut down on remembering complex serial codes, the black cartridge is £21.95 and the colour one is £44.95. That's not cheap! (Prices sourced from: https://vault1.secured-url.com/shopping/acatalog/i nkjet_cartridges_Deskjet_940C_26 9.html)

Overall, this is a thoroughly recommended printer for home use - high quality and extremely quiet, but the ink could prove excessively expensive, especially if you do a lot of colour printing.

I would have given this printer 5 out of 5 stars except for the high price of the colour ink cartridge.

Summary: