HP Deskjet 5940 > Reviews > HP 5940 - Brilliant, cheap printer!

Author's product rating:   

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

Advantages:	Excellent quality, very fast printer !
Disadvantages:	None really .  .  .

Recommend to potential buyers:

yes

Full review

I bought this printer safe in the knowledge that Hewlett-Packard produce quality printers - I wasn't let down. For less than £60 you can have a printer that is capable of printing good quality edge to edge photos or can print up to 30 pages of text a minute!

Installation

This printer was immensely easy to install. You didn't have to print a test page and check alignment then tell it what to do… It just got on with it. Plug it in, stick in the cd and voila! Printer! Annoyingly it didn't come with a usb lead so you have to buy one separately, but I think that this is fairly common practice these days.

Quality

Impressive! I was quite shocked at the quality of the prints on all modes (fast draft through to best quality). The quality of print on draft mode is brilliant, I print 90% of my stuff on fast draft as it is usually text and you can't see any real loss in quality. The photo prints are excellent, with or without special photo ink. The photos are not grainy and the printer picks out the colours brilliantly.

Print speed

If you adjust your print settings, and put it onto fast draft mode, it prints up to 30 pages a minute. Which is silly! There isn't much loss in quality, provided all you are printing is pages of black and white text. It takes a wee while to print the full page colour photographs but that is more than acceptable

Software

The printer comes with its own image editing software which is reasonably good for simple tasks such as red eye removal. It's very user friendly and regularly updates itself if you have an internet connection. The installation of the software, much like the printer itself, is a doddle. Just don't expect an all singing all dancing image editing package!!

Ink

I have had my printer a good while now and haven't had to change the cartridges. A black cartridge for this printer typically costs around £14, a colour cartridge is around £16 (for the larger cartridge) and there are special photo cartriges which are also around £14. Although there are photo cartridges it doesn't mean that you have to buy one to print your photos. The normal colour cartridge does a perfectly good job of it anyway. The photo cartridge is designed to enhance skin tones, vibrant colours and contrast for more lifelike photos.

Extras

If you like you can plug your camera into the PictBridge port on the front of the printer for direct printing from your camera. It is a usb port so you will not have to buy any new leads or adapters, you just use the one that came with your camera. Also, the printer comes with full cartridges (Black, tri colour and I got a photo one too) and a sample media pack which has a few sheets of photo paper.

Maintenance

I have only had this printer a few months but as of yet haven't had any problems with it at all!

Disadvantages

The only qualm I have with this printer is that the part you pull out for the printed pages to rest on is a bit flimsy, it wouldn't take much to break it. I keep my printer under my desk so the fact that it is retractable and folds away neatly is quite handy!

All in all an excellent printer - I recommend it to everyone. It's probably one of the best budget printers on the market, for less than £60 you can't complain!!

I'd like to add a little extra to this review...

Although I still think the print quality, speed and the ink consumed are all fantastic I've started to have some problems... This printer is just over a year old now and the feed mechanism is touch and go at best. The problem started around six months in and has worsened since. Basically the printer does not grip the paper and therefore does not feed properly. I contacted HP and they asked me all the usual questions (have I used te software cleaning, feeding problem shooters etc) then suggested I contact a different department and ask for a kit that has been designed for this printer to effectively remedy this problem. I am still waiting for my kit so will be back in touch after I've used it.