Excellent quality at reasonable price (HP Deskjet 970cxi)

Member Name: m.winrow

Product:	HP Deskjet 970cxi
Date:	31/12/00 (65 review reads)
Rating:

Advantages: Photo quality, fast, automatic two-sided printing, Mac support, free paper samples

Disadvantages: No cable, low capacity cartriges bundled

This is the third HP printer I have owned, and so far the best. I think the price tag of around £180 is good value for what you are getting.

In the box you get a generous sample of premium and photo papers, and I was truly impressed with the photo printing. Printing on plain paper also gives surprisingly good photo reproduction, although obviously not up to the quality you get from the photo paper.

Printing is also fast, HP claim you can get up to 12 pages per minute, but thats only for draft quality. Printing high-quality text is not this fast, but still fast enough and the printed text is always clear. One of the best printing features is that it can print on both sides of the paper automatically, without the need for you to turn it over. This can be a timesaver if you have to do this a lot. The module which allows this is supplied in the box and simply goes into the back of the printer, although this does increase the physical depth a little.

The other advantage is the USB support, so it is compatible with the Mac.

On the downside there is no printer cable supplied (just as with most other printers) so you will have to buy one of those in addition if you don't alreade have one, either a parallel or USB cable. The two cartriges supplied (the black and tri-colour cartriges) are only low-capacity so if you are a heavy user you may need to replace them fairly soon.

Summary: