Stinky Ink News

  Hewlett-Packard has just launched some good value multi function printers. These are the successors to the CM1015/1017, are available in 2 versions and are already on the market.

This printer is aimed above all at private users and small offices, thanks to its low ink and energy consumption. It’s optimal performance is reached when less than 1500 pages are printed per month. One new feature is the printer’s ability to automatically chose the optimal description language, meaning that the user does not have to determine beforehand whether the print job should be sent in PDL or in raster description.

This should prove advantageous for colour printing. The print speed is not very high – around 12 pages per minute in black and white, and 8 in colour at a 600 x 600 dpi resolution. Photocopies can be enlarged or reduced from 25 – 400%, and the scanner functions at a 1200dpi resolution.

The standard model, the Laserjet CM1312 MFP is 437 x 453 x 408mm, weighs 20.9kg and has an RRP of around £275. The Laserjet CM1312nfi MFP should cost around £80 more and has some extra features. These include a fax function, automatic document feed, a photo card slot, a colour display panel and a 10/100 Fast Ethernet connection. It is however slightly larger and heavier, measuring 497 x 485 x 470mm and weighing 24.4kg.

We will be reviewing this new printer range shortly, along with a pricing comparison.  HP have also launched new colour cartridges for the printer they are:

CB540A - HP Black Toner Cartridge 2,200 Pages @ 5% Yield

CB541A - HP Cyan Toner Cartridge 1,400 Pages @ 5% Yield

CB542A - HP Yellow Toner Cartridge 1,400 Pages @ 5% Yield

CB543A - HP Magenta Toner Cartridge 1,400 Pages @ 5% Yield

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If you are looking for a quick, high quality mono printer, then look no further than the HP LaserJet P1006.  Newly launched by HP, it is according to the company the smallest laser printer it has ever made and it certainly is compact and stylish. 

Highlights of the HP LaserJet P1006

• Space-saving design with visual appeal

• Ready when you are

• An array of performance and convenience features

• Budget-friendly pricing (Under £75 online)

Boasting a First Print out time of only 9 seconds, and a print speed of 16PPM, which translates into a real life print speed of 12.5PPM when printing combined text and graphics in our labs.

This printer is aimed squarely at the SOHO (Small Office Home Office) and as such comes with only a USB connection.  The cartridge is an all in one containing combined Photoconductor and Toner making for quick and easy replacement.  The cartridge utilises HP’s Spherical Toner which gives you a clear crisp black text and good grayscale for photo’s and images.  Priced at around £33 online the cartridge gives a page yield of 1,500 pages and a cost per page of £0.022 which is not bad value. 

In Summary, if you are in the market for a personal laser printer the HP LaserJet P1006 is a good simple machine, it’s easy to set up and use, doesn’t cost too much to run produces a very high quality output.  Easy maintenance and a quick print warm up means that this is a very good personal printing device

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HP Laserjet P1505 Review

Pitched by HP at the entrylevel end of the laser market the HP Laserjet P1505 is available online for under £100 at the time of writing (March 2008). This printer along with all of its rivals is made to a price and gives you no fancy control functions or LCD displays, instead reverts to buttons and LED’s. It more than makes up for this in the print speed department, with our tests giving an average of 22PPM in both normal and draft modes priting a mix of text and graphics.

The P1505 does lack in the connectivity stakes, with the only option being a USB 2.0 (High Speed) connection to a standalone PC, but there is a Networked option available the P1505N, but that adds nearly £60 to the price – which is a bit much.

As to print quality and costs. The P1505 uses the new Toner cartridge CB436A (36A) giving a page yield of 2,000 pages per cartridge and therefore a cost per page of £0.0225. Because it is a new cartridge there are no refilled or compatible cartridges around at the moment. Utilising HP’s spherical toner technology the printer produced clear dark text with no spidering, but graphics were a bit of a disapointment. On gradients we could see banding and the maximum resolution was only 600 x 600 dpi.

So, what do you get for your money?. A small neat standalone device, which is quiet and quick. First page out is 6.5 seconds from sleep mode which is very acceptable. A standard 250 Sheet input tray and 150 sheet output tray and offering the ability to print onto a range of media up to 163 GSM. If you are looking for a low cost mono home/small office desk printer then this could be the one for you.

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HP Laserjet M1120 MFP Review.

With recent research pointing to the fact that the majority of printers shipped these days are Multi Function, we have just had a look at HP’s new offering in the Mono Multi Function Printer (MFP) section of the market. The HP Laserjet M1120 is available online for just over £100 + VAT for which you get mono laser printer, scanner and copier – a bargain!. If you are thinking of buying this machine I would suggest that you specify the M1120n, which comes complete with 10/100Base-T Ethernet port which adds a measly £16 to the purchase price, but adds oodles of flexibility in any small office.

My only real disappointment with the machine is that the standard memory is only 32Mb which is not upgradable nor can you increase the input paper tray sizes. They come as standard 250 and 125 sheet capacity.

The text output is crisp and dark and documents produced on this machine will look very professional. Based on HP’s own yield figures for the toner cartridge CB436A which gives 2,000 pages you will get a page cost at about £0.022, which is reasonable. We can’t offer any compatible/refilled cartridges for it yet. Print speed is advertised at 19PPM, but is more like 12PPM in our tests. First page out is 7 seconds which is good. Offering 1200 x 1200 dpi scanning this machine is good value for the asking price

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The Color LaserJet 1600 uses an in-line engine, which means black and colour prints should take pretty much the same time. This is borne out by our test results, where our five-page mono text document took 56 seconds to complete and our five-page colour text and graphics piece took 57 seconds. This gives a print speed of around 5.3ppm, a little way off the 8ppm claimed by HP. Subjectively, print output appears slow, too.

Printed text is crisp and clean, with little sign of splatter or poorly formed characters in its 600dpi output. Colour print is also clean, but there’s a slight fuzziness with black text on coloured backgrounds. This is a little surprising, as the printer uses HP’s much heralded ColorSphere toner, which should offer ‘better flow onto the page’. Colour rendition is fair, though colours still looked too intense in our photo test piece and there was loss of detail in darker areas.

HP claims the printer is particularly quiet and we wouldn’t argue with this, measuring it at a peak of 58dBA and an average below 55dBA. It makes few of the clunks and thumps which many entry-level laser printers, including earlier HP models, produce.

So, to the all important running costs. The Color LaserJet 1600 takes four drum/toner cartridges and HP considers the transfer belt a lifetime component. The cartridges are the Q6000A Black, Q6001A Cyan, Q6002A Yellow and Q6003A Magenta and are rated at 2,500 pages for black and 2,000 pages each for cyan, magenta and yellow. HP Original cartridges are around £50 each, with good quality compatibles at around £30 for the black and £35 for colour online at HP Colour Laserjet 1600

This gives original print costs of 2.49p for a black page and 10.60p for colour and about half that using the compatibles.

Verdict

This is an inexpensive colour laser printer to buy and is easy to maintain and use. It prints quietly and with a minimum of fuss, but colour output is not as natural as with some others and you may need to tweak the software to get the tints you want. It’s also quite costly to run, with page costs at the upper end of the bracket for this class of colour printer.

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