I'm in Printing Heaven (HP Deskjet 940c)

Member Name: Vialdana

Product:	HP Deskjet 940c
Date:	18/08/02 (787 review reads)
Rating:

Advantages: Good price

Disadvantages: cartridges are a bit pricy

Having owned a Hewlett-Packard deskjet 610c printer for the past 3 years without any problems at all, When it went wrong last week although I was most miffed as you can imagine it did seem like well fairs fair, maybe it needed a service, after all 3 years without a problem wasn't bad really. However, I then found that the problem wasn't fixable which left me cross as I use my printer pretty much on a daily basis, and this meant an unwanted shopping trip, and unwanted costs too.

OK, Out to search the shops (luckily there seemed to be a lot of sales on which improved my mood somewhat). Lots of printers, and lots of prices, but which to choose? We had almost settled on the hp deskjet 656c at £50 when a very helpful sales chap came to chat with us and basically persuaded us that there the 940c would be a far better model to go for. Not liking to buy something which isn't going to be good for what we want, we stopped and listened to what he had to say. Several very sensible arguments that he put forward made re-think our original ideas, and look more closely at the 940c, and I am very glad we did.

The basic specification is as follows:
Black text print speed:
Draft = 12 ppm (pages per minute)
Normal = 6.7 ppm
Best = 2.9 ppm

Mixed text with colour graphics print speed:
Draft = 10 ppm
Normal = 5.3 ppm
Best = 1.2

The maximum Dpi (Dots per inch for those of less technical mindedness) is 1200 x 2400, which is based on best mode, and using high quality photo paper and a reasonable amount of ink (lower quality papers like photocopy paper which is often used for ordinary text printing can't cope with the ink saturation to allow for this sort of coverage, so you aren?t likely to use or need this high a dpi very often unless you plan on printing lots of photo quality pictures).

Installation was easy, plug in the printer, shove the CD in the drive, and follow a few really basic instruc
tions. Registering the purchase online took all of a minute I would say, and all was complete. Time then to have a play.

OK, as you'll have gathered from the spec details above there are 3 basic print modes (most printers these days have this, and certainly I would say 99% of inkjet printers do, so not really any surprises there). Other features this printer offers are: the ability to print a colour document in greyscale. It will allow you to put up to 4 pages which were originally each A4 onto one side of one A4 sheet of paper ? yes this makes them very much smaller, but it's wonderful for me when I need to print a brief flyer to be included with the newsletter I edit, or when I want to print something to take with me somewhere, but I don't need it to be full size etc. You can adjust the amount of ink being pushed onto the paper, and adjust the depth of colour and brightness. My favourite feature is that there is a section which gives you an estimate of how much ink is left in your cartridges so if it shows you to be very low, you can order your new cartridges before you actually run out. It is only an estimate, and not having had this printer long, I can?t tell you how accurate it will prove to be, but when I know I will update accordingly, on the same page as this, it reminds you also which cartridges you need for this printer, so no need to fish inside the machine to check these details either.

The final feature I'd like to tell you about is a physical one on the printer, its designed for if paper ever jams inside the printer. There is a panel on the back of the printer which allows you to pull the paper which has jammed out without dragging it over the print heads. Now if you already know about this then forgive me for over explaining, but for those who may not know, let me explain a) why this is so good, and b) the difference here between hp printers and most other inkjet printers.

On most printers the print h
ead is a fixed part of the printer, it is fairly delicate, so dragging paper which is all crushed over it, doesn't do it a great deal of good, so you see why this open-able panel is a neat idea. The difference with the print heads on hp printers is that instead of the head being attached to the printer, and the cartridge full of ink being fitted against the print head each time it needs replacing, the print head on an hp inkjet is attached to the cartridge and so is replaced each time you replace the cartridge. This does make the ink cartridges on average slightly more expensive, but it does mean that your quality of print remains high throughout the life of the printer. (the cartridges for this are priced approx. £22 and £26 each (separate black and colour cartridges)

Having settled on this model, we looked about to get the best price, in Comet, they were selling it in their sale for £88 but on looking about it bit we managed to get ours for £80 from Dixons, so if you do decide to buy one of these do look about so you get the best deal possible.

*It's 2009 now and I still have this printer - it's nearly at the end of it's life to be honest, as there's a clip broken inside so it eats paper if you try to print more than one sheet at a time. Overall though, excellent value for money considering how long it's lasted!

Summary: A printer that just keeps going and going

Processing/Quality:
Reliability:
Ease of use:
Print quality: