HP DeskJet 5550, The Star Of The New Season — THG.RU

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The Star Of The New Season» —>

The article first appeared in Tom’s Hard News Email Newsletter

Introduction

The new HP series, which takes the form of the Deskjet 5550, comes wreathed in goodies.

To start with, there’s the technology. Away with PhotoRet III and in with PhotoRet IV! This means that you get six basic colors instead of four, giving you much better results in photo mode. The drop size has changed from five to four pico-liters and the PhotoRet IV has 1.2 million collors, instead of the 3500 colors available in the PhotoRet III mode. When we used it, we did notice a considerable gain in quality. The dots have gone and flesh tones and shading are much more faithful.

This may be a less important aspect in the end, but the design has been revised, as well. The new HP series sports a sleeker look than the previous one. It gives an overall impression of speed, which, the results show, is quite well deserved.

The last and most important point, at least in our opinion, is that the price of the cartridges has gone down. AT LONG LAST!

The downside is that they do not last as long, but costs per page have nonetheless dropped. The Deskjet 5550 should cost you about 15% less in ink than the last generation. But this drop will not benefit owners of earlier HP printers, because the cartridges are different: the new ones are smaller. The price drop was needed but is still inadequate. We are still waiting for proper good-value cartridges so we can use the printer more often. We explain it all later on in this article

HP Wants To Stand Out From The Crowd

HP prides itself on coming up with models that print text and photos of equally good quality. Up until now, nobody seems able to compete with this. Canon, Epson and Lexmark printers are all a bit specialized in some ways, and tend to be optimized for one mode or another.

To take this versatility even further, HP has re-adopted a system tried by many but which has recently been discontinued, especially by Lexmark: combining a set of standard cartridges with photo cartridges. With standard cartridges, the printer works in PhotoRet III, but it is faster and produces perfect text and graphics. With the photo cartridges, printing text is rather tedious and generally less satisfactory. This photo cartridge (#58 in image below) contains non-pigmented, light cyan, light magenta and black ink, instead of the pigmented black (#56 in image below); the photos it prints are, on the other hand, much better. The color cartridge (#57 in image below) is shared by both sets.

The second difference of the Deskjet 5550 compared to its rivals (with the exception of the Lexmark Z65), is a sensor for automatically adjusting the print resolution to the kind of paper used. This is very efficient, and it means that the driver only needs to use four print qualities: Best, Normal, Every Day and Fast Draft. In all four cases, the printer works in PhotoRet III or IV, depending on whether the type of cartridge is standard or photo. The maximum resolution claimed (4800 x 1200 dpi) can only be attained if the sensor is ignored and the paper type chosen manually. Our tests showed that prints at 4800 dpi are not the best and take three or four times longer than those done with PhotoRet IV Best. So the answer is to print in PhotoRet mode.

Tests

All the tests were done with both cartridge sets: standard and photo. You can find the full list of tests here.

Estimated Costs Per Page

This is the exception to the rule: all the tests were done with both cartridge sets, except the lifetime test. We measured this on the cartridge delivered with the printer, with black plus three colors.

As we said at the beginning, there is finally some good news for consumers on both sides of the Atlantic: HP has (at long last) lowered the price of its consumables. Below are the mid-August prices for HP printer cartridges:

The drop is notable, though it goes hand in hand with a shorter lifetime. But costs per page have still gone down:

Just a brief comment: HP is no longer the manufacturer that charges the most for ink. This unwelcome trophy is now held by Lexmark, although HP is still close on their heels. When will HP printers be really economical to use? When asked about this, they admit that this is not at the top of the agenda for the time being. They feel that their printers don’t cost the consumer so very much. Their own polls show that you, their customers, only change cartridges twice a year. According to our tests, this means that you print about 500 pages a year, barely a ream of paper.

A little bit of price analysis: two cartridge sets = US$110 of ink (€142 for Europeans). This works out to the price of approximately one new printer a year, but we’ll let that pass. Here’s another analysis for you: 500 pages a year (500/12) = 41.7 pages per month. So they assume that you print less than ten pages a week, and, more importantly, you don’t print photos. So, if you still haven’t got the message:

HP prints are far too expensive. They work out to be three times the price of a Canon for similar, perfectly acceptable quality. HP printers are strictly for «occasional users» who print less than 1.4 pages a day, or one page a day and the occasional photo.

And the price differences increase still further if you add the printer purchase price to the cost of printing 3000 pages, with 1500 monochrome and 1500 color:

Let’s hope the message will get across now.

Speed Results

With its design halfway between a razor head and the front of a high speed train, and with speeds announced at 17 ppm in N&B and 12 ppm in color, we expected to find a fast worker. And the Deskjet 5550 does actually work fast, but not faster than the previous Deskjet generation. The PSC 950, tested here with the same methods, and based on the Deskjet 970cxi motor, was actually a tad faster.

In short, the Deskjet 5550 does the following:

• prints color documents just as fast as black and white documents;
• works much faster with the standard cartridge set;
• prints office documents at a rate of 4 pages per minute;
• prints a 10 x 15 cm photo in about two minutes.

With standard cartridges (three colors + black):

With standard cartridges (three colors + photo cartridge):

Photo speed:

Quality Results

In a word: fantastic!

It’s not easy to find fault with this printer. Even the draft mode, called «Fast Draft» in the driver, is good. In fact, the quality is so good that it suffices in many cases. However, if you find it irritating to switch between the standard and photo sets, make do with the first, i.e., the combination of black plus three colors. This way, the Deskjet 5550 gives excellent results on conventional paper and lovely pictures on photo paper, though seen close up, they will still show some dots. One positive aspect is that the photos are still good on lightweight paper of 80 g/mІ.

With the photo cartridge, text pages tend more towards gray than black, but the photos can compare with those of the Canon S900 and the Epson Stylus Photo. None of its rivals in this price class (Canon S520, Epson C70, Lexmark Z65) can catch up with it. The Deskjet 5550 is therefore the most versatile middle-range model around at the moment, and it’s the one to buy if you only print the occasional photo and not too much text.

But there is one frustrating thing: the Deskjet 5550 cannot print full pages (A4 or Letter) with no border. This often causes problems with large format photos, presentation leaflets or any document where the layout needs to be positioned exactly.

Standard cartridge set

Photo cartridge set

Conclusion

We really loved the Deskjet 5550. Its speed is adequate, prints are always very good to excellent, and, although this is a matter of taste, we find it very stylish. But we did find it had some faults (maybe growing pains?):

• Although the price of cartridges fell in August, we found the costs per page with this printer are still high. High enough to use it only for printing just a few pages a week.
• Twice during the tests it took two sheets of paper at a time. Let’s hope that this was just a bit of bad luck on the model we had.
• It is noisy.
• When you have to keep on removing the black and white cartridges and putting them back, you are bound to blunder in the end. You could easily put one of them in the wrong way, for instance. Now, as we realized by accident, if there is a failsafe system, it is not infallible. You soon see your mistake. If the cartridge is installed the wrong way, the printer starts making such a ruckus that you’ll think it’s about to die. Removing the guilty cartridge is no easy matter but, after five minutes of testing, it finally started working again as though nothing had happened.
• Printing can take a long time to start. If you include the time it takes to analyze the paper, the printer often only really starts working after about ten seconds.
• Lastly, although it had worked fine for some 500 pages and a variety of photos, the printer suddenly started developing printing problems. Text pages still came out at the right speed, but the photos started to take a long time and the process was jumpy. All at once, after another twenty pages, the images didn’t come through at all. We tried changing options, applications, formats, cartridges and weights, restarts and blanking, but it all made no difference. We had to uninstall and reinstall the printer completely before the situation returned to normal.

Marks for photo suitability and versatility are valid if you switch between the standard and photo cartridge sets. If you just use the first set, both scores should be four.