HP DesignJet 130 > Reviews > Size is sometimes very important

Author's product rating:   

Picture quality	Excellent
Printing speed	Fast
Colour sensitivity	Excellent
Ease of use	Very easy
Value For Money	Excellent

Advantages:	Prints are massive  and very high quality
Disadvantages:	Big initial outlay  -  unlikely to be useful for the average home user .

Recommend to potential buyers:

yes

Full review

In the past when we have needed large format prints e.g. for health promotion campaign posters we have either done them by hand or outsourced them. Doing them by hand might sound like the cheapest option and its okay for one-offs but anything more than that has real costs in terms of ‘man’ hours. Outsourcing also has expensive costs and is only worth doing when you want a lot as this brings the cost per sheet down.

Due to budget restraints we have had to think much more carefully about how we spend our money and how we can also generate more income. This is the main reason we started to cost oversized printers. These have always tended to be expensive as they were aimed mainly at the commercial market but are now much more reasonable. We decided to buy the HP DesignJet 130, A1 Inkjet Printer mainly due to its price but also because we were allowed to have a demonstration. It costs £820.12 excluding VAT (as we are a registered charity for fundraising purposes we don’t pay VAT) adding VAT to the price will raise it to £963.64.

It does appear to be a large amount of money, but many other departments in the NHS and social services are in the same boat so we will be able to share with them. We charge reasonable rates; enough to cover the price of inks, wear and tear plus a few pence profit per sheet but we expect them to supply paper- if they don’t we charge over the market price for the inconvenience. We charge more for A1 prints as these have to be fed in individually unless they provide a staff member to do this and we charge less for A2 as these are automatic. This printer over its first month generated enough to cover a ¼ of its cost which isn’t bad

HP DesignJet 130, A1 Inkjet Printer
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This printer is not as big as one would expect considering the size it prints out. Its dimensions are 1050 x 415 x 220 mm (W x D x H) and it weighs 22 kg. It has 6 individual ink cartridges; black, cyan, magenta, yellow, light cyan and light magenta.

The maximum paper size is 1625 mm x 625 mm (Length x Width) and it leaves a border of 5 mm at the top and sides with the border being 12 mm at the bottom. You can also have an optional paper roll feed with this printer but we didn’t; we use precut paper (the roll feeder is another £500 so wasn’t worth it for us). It can, of course, print smaller pieces anything including and above postcard size (100x148 mm) but we don’t use it for anything less than A2 as we have printers that do A4 and smaller already and the ink for these is cheaper. A 70 ml cartridge for the DesignJet 130 cost around £20

The tray holds 100 sheets of A2 sized paper and it will automatically print this size. When printing A1 you feed it individually through the front bypass slot. There is also a rear bypass slot for use with heavy weight or rigid sheets. It will print onto virtually all media including glossy, semi-gloss and matte proofing papers, plain paper, inkjet, coated and heavyweight coated paper although it does recommend HP papers

The DesignJet 130 was incredibly easy to install; just a matter of loading the software and plugging it in through the USB, ours isn’t a networked version by the way… we don’t want anyone else to have access to it. Our IT department did the install and it literally took seconds and took longer to unpack it than install it. You can buy HP software for it but we already have several capable graphics programmes, including adobe illustrator and Photoshop which work well. The art room staff and clients enjoy being creative and their results are excellent. I don’t get to play with it much unfortunately.

We have recently started selling photograph enlargements printed on to A3 Canvas Fine Art paper, at the suggestion of one of the art staff, which are really impressive and we expect to sell quite a few of these. A high quality digital photo is necessary for these though.

The finished results are high quality as the printer produces 2400 x 1200 dpi with the tiny 4-picoliter ink drop size. The colours are excellent but we have not used any inks other than HP’s. You are able to print at draft quality as a proof first to ensure everything is right before you print out a run which does save on ink. It isn’t particularly quick to print out a sheet but the sheets art so much larger than usual sizes so it’s easy to expect too much. It takes around 6 minutes per page of A3 and around 17 minutes per page of A1 which isn’t really too bad and does give you time to do other things when printing out A1’s as it isn’t worth standing over it waiting.

What you get in the box:
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• HP Designjet 130 printer
• power cord,
• 6 printheads
• 6 print cartridges
• input/output tray,
• Macroinstaller
• user documentation CD,
• setup poster
• quick start guide
• media samples
• customer care document

The printer is suitable for both Windows and Macs although I don’t know about Vista as none of our computers other than my laptop use it

So far we have only had 1 problem with the printer which was due to an IT upgrade which lost the printer drivers but once they were reinstalled everything has been fine. Considering it was such a big expense that I was quite worried about authorising it has turned out quite well. For us it is the perfect model for our needs and I would certainly recommend it. The HP DesignJet 130 is just like its smaller HP relatives; its quality is excellent, it is easy to use and as long as you can justify the expense you will be happy.