The first thing to say about the Hp DeskJet 5550 is its 4,800 by 1,200 mode, that it's only available when printing high-resolution photos. The source images must be at least 1,200 dpi and printed on photographic paper. For other jobs with other paper types, such as Plain Paper or Transparency’s, the HP is a 1,200 by 1,200 dpi printer.
The second thing is that it doesn't really matter regarding what resolution the printer can print at. Just as today's PC graphics cards can display more colours than the human eye can see, today's inkjets' variable droplet sizes and resolution-enhancement schemes make the numbers race rather meaningless once past the four-figure resolution mark. This means that the 1200 dpi would hardly be noticeably different compared to 4800 dpi.
Ignore inkjets' advertised speeds too, the DeskJet 5550 is rated at up to 17 pages per minute for black text and 12 ppm for colour printing, but like most printers it falls short of claimed speed even for draft (everyday) mode, let alone for high-quality output.
The important thing to say about the 5550 is that it's a relatively fast and sharp printer for both plain text and photographic images. It is also a good ‘temporary’ special-purpose photo printer with use of the Hp 58 photo cartridge. It lacks the standard digital-camera memory-card slots that are found on dedicated photo printers; however having said that it can produce borderless 4 by 6-inch prints. The use of an additional two colours of ink (light cyan and light magenta) can be achieved by the use of the Hp 58 photo cartridge; producing even more life like images in my honest opinion.
There are several drawbacks with this printer: It hogs desk space with it being larger than the average inkjet printer
It guzzles ink cartridges especially in best mode; your consumables budget will run out before its 2500-page duty cycle each month. With black #57 inks costing around £20 a cartridge and colour #56 inks costing around £26 a cartridge and photo #58 inks costing around £24 a cartridge. All of are stated to do around 500 pages each so £20 x 6 = £120 and £26 x 6 = £156 All in all = £276! That is over 3 times the cost of the printer. It is possible to refill the inks luckily however the computer recognises this and doesn’t print. I have found that you can get around this by doing the following:
- Uninstall the printer driver rom windows - Install the printer on linux - Put new inks in on linux o/s - Reinstall printer driver for windows - You now have full inks again
Features:
On/off, cancel current job, and resume (after a paper jam or outage) buttons. Both USB and parallel ports (Only USB cable included) are at the rear, next to the socket for the AC power adapter (230V), whose brick-sized plug end can monopolize an outlet or power strip.
The printer has a 100-sheet input and 50-sheet output tray. I have managed to make it hold 110 80g/sm paper input and 55 80g/sm paper output! Its horizontal loading (you lift the output tray and slide paper into the narrow input-tray slot) and sharp-U-turn paper path. A snap-in duplexer or automatic two-sided printing feeder is an £60 option.
Instead of many inkjets' draft, normal, high-quality, and best-quality modes, the 5550 offers a choice of modes: FastDraft (strictly sketchy) Everyday (sharper, but still for in-house use) Normal (suitable for all audiences) Best, (with resolutions ranging from 300 by 300 dpi for text (600 by 300 for graphics) to 1,200 by 1,200 dpi for both (plus the 4,800 by 1,200 deluxe-photo mode).
The driver also lets you print one, two, or four pages per sheet or blow up an image for poster printing across four, nine, or 16 sheets; HP also supplies a print-screen utility. Fancier still, you can choose manual or automatic tweaking of contrast and other settings for photo printing. I found the FastDraft mode so faint as to make a new ink cartridge look old, but still readable and definitely fast. By using plain paper, five pages of mixed-font text printed in just 54 seconds, and the DeskJet spat out a pale 7.5 by 10-inch photo in 34 seconds. Everyday mode wasn't bad, but Normal mode was only a bit slower (1 minute 39 seconds versus 1 minute 37 seconds for my five pages) and looked fine on the cheap paper, except possibly for the smallest (8-point) type and largest, blackest banner fonts. Twenty pages on plain paper took just under seven minutes in Normal mode.
When I switched to coated inkjet paper, the HP's output (like all inkjet printers') sharpened considerably -- and the 300 by 300 dpi Everyday text (1 minute 58 seconds) competed quite well with 600 by 600 dpi Normal (2 minutes 52 seconds) in our five-page test, the latter a hair sharper but almost too dark or blotted in a few places. The mix of Best mode and coated paper was much quicker than I expected (3 minutes 41 seconds), but not that much better-looking than its brothers -- again, just one or two lines on each page struck me as just a bit smudgy or detectably inkjet- rather than laser-generated.
The printer is cheap producing quality results but its accompanying ink isn’t. Since I have bought this printer last year, it has been replaced by the 5552 model. Overall it is a good buy in the short term, but in the long term the ink pays you back.
More details
Reliability
Excellent
Design
Good
Range of extra features / functions
Good
Instruction manual
Good
Manufacturer Support
Satisfactory
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