|
Hewlett Packard has always been recognised as a reliable manufacturer of both inkjet and laser printers. In recent years the company has expanded its range to cover every level of printing requirement from home user to large scale business. This article will look at HP's range of printers designed for the home and home office user. The Officejet Pro K5400 is HP's entry level colour inkjet printer. It boasts an impressive, high quality speed of 12 pages per minutes black & white, 10 pages per minute colour and an even faster draft quality of 36 pages per minute black & white, 35 pages per minute colour. Its maximum resolution is 1200 x 1200 dpi black and up to 4800 x 1200 dpi colour, when using photo quality paper. This means that the printer is more than adequate for home use, office proofs and even printing photo printing. As with most of the other printers offered by HP, it is available to purchase with a range of interfacing options ranging from a single USB 2.0 port to built in Ethernet networking. Moving on to the laser printers, HP also offers the Color Laserjet 1600, which is its entry level model. The low price is by no means, however, a sign that it is lacking in features. On the contrary, its 16mb of built in memory and 264 MHz processor mean that this printer is able to process even large jobs at an impressive speed. It can deliver high quality colour and black & white prints at speeds of up to 8 pages per minute and with a maximum resolution of 600 x 600 dpi, it has no trouble printing photos for home or office use. Its interface is limited to a single USB 2.0 port, meaning that this printer is not designed for large scale network use. The 1600 also supports a wide variety of media types including plain paper, envelopes, labels, photo quality glossy paper, bond and even presentation transparency, making it suitable for almost all small office applications. On top of this, a 250 sheet capacity paper tray, small desktop footprint and low price mean that this printer will fit into the budget and space of any home or small business user, who is either looking to make the transition from inkjet to laser printer or is simply looking for an effective and affordable printing solution. The HP Color Laserjet 2605 is HP's top of the range home and home office laser printer and it differs from the 1600 in variety of ways. Although it is more expensive, it does again justify its price by providing a myriad of features that are indispensable to the small business user. First of all, it boasts a 300 MHz processor and 64 MB of base memory (expandable to 320 MB!). This means that it will accept and process with ease even the most complex of jobs that may contain many high resolution photographs or images. It is even faster than the 1600 and can print 10 pages per minute of normal quality colour and 12 pages per minute of black & white. Again, a printing resolution of 600 x 600 dpi means that the 2605 is perfect for printing photographs and even small posters in-house. The 2605 is available in three separate models, the 2605, 2605dn and 2605dtn. The 2605dn and 2605dtn both offer a full automatic duplex option and a built in Ethernet print server so that the printer may be connected directly to an office network. These options are not available on the 2605, which only has a high speed USB 2.0 interface and manual duplex. Furthermore, the 2605dtn offers not one but two 250 sheet paper trays as well as a built in memory card reader that supports the direct printing of images from a wide range of cards. The 2605 of is, of course, both Mac and PC compatible. Whatever the home or home office requirement and budget, HP has both inkjet and laser printers to suit. The printers are supported by regular driver updates and prompt responses to technical support queries, making them both an economical and a reliable choice for any user. If you are still wondering which printer is best for you, check out this article - which printer .
Staff editor, Electronics Section, February 2007 |
