To
go color or not to go color was not the question. My wife, Juanita, had
already decided that. Now it was up to me to do the easy part...decide
which printer to purchase...We were lucky in that we needed paper for the
old reliable Panasonic KX-P1124 and stopped by Office Max and Office Depot
to price some. Both of them had a shelf full of printers hooked up so they
could be tried. What a beautiful way to do business; don't we wish we could
do the same with programs? After going down the line, in both stores, just
to be sure the output was the same, we finally settled on the Hewlet-Packard
DESKJET 855C. I'll try to explain why.
First, and fairly important, was the fact that both the Paper IN and OUT trays were on the front face of the printer. This means you do not need access above the printer nor in back of the printer. Both cables, power and signal, come out of the sides of the case but are oriented such that the cables do not extend beyond the case itself. Makes for a real neat installation.
Secondly, and equally important, there are separate ink cartridges for COLOR and for BLACK. Not just a separate compartment in one overall cartridge. This saves money in the long run as most printing is black and the separate black cartridge is easily replaced without disturbing the color one. The same is true of the color cartridge. If you do a tremendous amount of color work the cartridge is replaceable separately and as an added benefit, you have not wasted any color ink making black print.
Subjectively, the output doesn't appear that much different from some of the others that we looked at. The colors are clear and "sparkling" if that is the picture you put in. Pastels come out looking natural. We use the system primarily for printing pictures that Juanita has scanned. Some of the older stuff has been 'improved' in the photo program we have, and prints better than expected. We use ordinary paper for most of the things we print, but when we use the special "Ink Jet" paper it does show improvement.
HP has two additional programs on the installation disk with the driver. One is a "Resolution Enhancement Technology (RET)" and the other is "Color Smart".
RET is a set of algorithmic rules that instructs the printer to add, remove and position dots individually to produce crisp edges and smooth text. RET is used primarily in black text printing. Color Smart, on the other hand, selects the most 'vibrant' hues from the multitude of color choices. Color Smart identifies objects as text, graphics or photographic elements on each page and then selects the best color setting to produce the optimun results. Can't say as how I understand that, but it seems to work fine.
The 855C has three levels of output: Best, Normal and Econofast. When printing in BLACK, the first two are at 600 dpi and Econfast is 300 dpi. In COLOR all three are at 300 dpi but Econofast does not use RET. BLACK print speed is from 4 to 7 PPM depending on print output level and COLOR speed is from 1 to 3 PPM, again, depending on level.
The HP855C installation disk has a slew of fonts, both for Windows and for Mac. Most standard fonts are built in. The disk fonts are "scalable TrueType". There are many Character Sets included, e.g. Norwegin, Turkish, German and Latin.
The Printer has 1 MB of RAM and a 32 kb receive buffer. There are programs to ALIGN the ink nozzles and well as to CLEAN them. It will also make transparencies and envelopes.
All in all, we have been happy with the printer and have received many compliments on the output. There was no trouble installing the driver on our AST p75. The one 'con' that made us hesitate was the warranty. The other HP printers had 3 year warranties and the 855C only one year. Couldn't find out why, but as I used to work next door to the HP plant in Palo Alto I gained a healthy respect for the company and the equipment they produce.
We paid $499 for our printer. Cartridges are about $27 for black
and over $30 for color. We haven't bought any color yet. So far as I know,
no one has come up with a home kit for refilling the 850 series cartridges.
It a new formulation.