HP Deskjet 3050A > Reviews (13)

Me and my girlfriend share our printer and use it on a weekly basis for our university work. After comparing many of the cheapest printers online, we went to PC world and looked first hand for the cheapest printer/ink ratio. The printer cost £39.99 with the inks totalling £30. Our aim to buy the cheapest printer hasn’t worked out in the long run as 10 weeks later we have replaced the colour twice.

The colour is built into one cartridge but allows the printer to resume printing even if one of them is empty. However the black is still going on its first cartridge. Within the first week of using it we did print A LOT of photos, which would constitute to the amount of ink we have gone through. The printer fits well on a desktop as it is only a small thing, but makes an unprecedented amount of noise, so it can’t be used late at night. The quality of print is average, on plain or photo paper. For a size A4 sheet of text it takes 5-8 seconds, and for a photo print, well I lost count after 30 seconds.

The provided USB lead is too short to reach around to the side of my laptop, but it has a wireless feature that allows you to connect to simply that computer, or a local network for more than 1 computer to use. This feature has so far only allowed my laptop (main installer) to print wirelessly without trouble, whilst my girlfriend’s laptop has only managed to connect and print once. After a short period of time without use it goes into idle mode, if you send something to print it will often take a while to connect (wake up), or not wake up at all. On a rare occasion, it will send two copies to print once you do ‘wake it up’.

Buy a Kodak.