HP Business Inkjet 2600

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HP say this printer is designed to "unleash the full potential of colour in the office by printing quickly and brilliantly on more types of media than ever". Let's take a look at this statement:

"Printing quickly" - OK it is quicker than your average home printer but it is slow compared to many office printers I have used

"Printing brilliantly" - erm, ...
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I think HP were aiming at the smaller business market here, those who couldn't afford laser jets but who still wanted to print in colour, great idea in theory but in my opinion you may as well just buy a cheap printer from Currys as it will do just as good a job (if not better).


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**Features**
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So, we have discovered that it prints on paper. That's ... more

OK before I say anything else about this printer, let me just warn you... DON'T BUY IT!! I use this printer all the time at work and it is the absolute bane of my life. In the interests of fairness, I will firstly describe the printer to you and then I will describe why I hate it:

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**Looks**
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It looks pleasant enough, dark and light shades of grey. It is made from plastic, as I think all printers are. It is about 72cm wide by 57cm deep and 28cm tall. (To get those measurements I just had to walk over to the printer with my ruler and I got some very funny looks). OK I probably shouldn't be writing this at work … but it's a slow day!

The top right of the printer has a flap that opens to reveal the print cartridges. It takes 4 cartridges - black, cyan, magenta and yellow. The printer also has a small screen that gives messages. Below this are 3 buttons - power, resume and cancel, and also an LED light to show it is powered on.

There are 4 "double" buttons (you know the ones that have a different function each end, like a volume button). These are: Menu, Item, Value and Select. These are used to navigate through the maze of menus.

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**Purpose**
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HP say this printer is designed to "unleash the full potential of colour in the office by printing quickly and brilliantly on more types of media than ever". Let's take a look at this statement:

"Printing quickly" - OK it is quicker than your average home printer but it is slow compared to many office printers I have used

"Printing brilliantly" - erm, nope. We have had 2 of these printers in our office (the first one had to be replaced after less than a year because it kept breaking down, more on that later), and neither of them has printed straight on the page. And the resolution is pretty pants.

"On more types of media than ever" - What does this mean exactly? Yes, it prints on paper, and yes, I think it even prints on acetates … but what else is there? Oh yes, it does labels too. Just like your £20 home printer.

I think HP were aiming at the smaller business market here, those who couldn't afford laser jets but who still wanted to print in colour, great idea in theory but in my opinion you may as well just buy a cheap printer from Currys as it will do just as good a job (if not better).

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**Features**
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So, we have discovered that it prints on paper. That's good then. It can print A4 or A3 (500 pages capacity), and can even do double sided if you buy the duplex unit like we did. This makes it really slow though, as it has to print one side, then feed the page back through, dry it (not sure how it does this but the warning flashes up saying "Page drying, DO NOT TOUCH!"), and then print the second side.

The resolution is 1200 x 1600 dpi.

What else … oh yes it can print on acetates and on labels. And that's about it. It has a small display screen which gives helpful information like "Initialising" or "Cyan ink low". Great you may say … except it has a habit of saying these things at random points and not when it needs to. My biggest problem with this printer was when it was sat on the end of my desk. I could guarantee that at least 50% of people using it would be puzzled by one of the messages and have to ask me what to do.

The worst problem was that it would constantly say that the print heads were low. The only cure for this was to turn the thing off and on again. Usually this worked. However sometimes we had to pull it out from the mains as it refused to power off. The "print heads low" message caused much confusion as well. I lost count of the number of good ink cartridges that we wasted because people saw that message and assumed it meant the ink cartridge needed changing. Not entirely their fault, if you're not used to printers like that you might assume that any message with the words "print" and "low" in it meant you needed more ink.

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**Connection**
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You can connect this printer via a parallel port or a USB port. Ours is networked.

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**Noise**
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To be fair, the printer isn't actually that noisy when printing. What causes more noise is when the paper jams and it then makes several loud clunking noises trying to sort itself out.

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**Speed**
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The printer can print 15 pages per minute of black and white or 11 pages per minute of colour printing. Not too bad but not great either.

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**Ink usage**
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The ink usage is fairly reasonable, we use it quite a lot (say 50+ pages a day) and don't normally have to replace the cartridges more than once every few weeks.

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**Cost**
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I was just searching for the price of this printer and I found out that it had been discontinued! No great surprises there. I think we paid about £500 - £600 for it originally about 2 years ago so I suppose it's not too expensive but I don't think it justifies the cost when you can buy a colour printer for about £50 on the high street. The duplex unit was about an extra £120, and the ink cartridges cost £16.99 each.

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**Problems**
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So, down to the nitty gritty - just why am I so fed up with this printer? Here are just a few of the problems we have had with it:

Frequent paper jams
Wrong messages (e.g. print heads need replacing when they are fine)
It shuts down for no reason
It prints wonky on the page

The last one is possibly the most annoying - it doesn't look too good when you are printing something for the Executive team and it comes out wonky on the page. We have never been able to solve this problem, despite many calls to the IT servicing people. They could also never get to the bottom of the constant paper jams and wrong messages displayed on the screen.

Thankfully I have moved desks now, so the printer is no longer right next to me, (or I might have smashed it into pieces by now), but it still causes problems. We had the original one replaced after about a year because it was so temperamental, but the new one is just as bad. I have been begging the manager to authorise us to buy a LaserJet for about 6 months now because the 2600 just cannot cope with the volume that we put through it. A LaserJet would be much quicker and produce better quality prints.

Would I recommend this printer? In a word, no.

Thanks for reading :o)
 

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