Want To Make Money With Your Digital Camera?
Then check out Camera Dollars here.
Learn How to Make Money with Photography by Selling Photos
At the budget end of the inkjet marketplace, there are a number of printers available, but not many at the monetary value of HP’s new Deskjet D1660. From Internet suppliers like Amazon, you can pick one up for well under £30, so what do you get for that kind of money?
Unsurprisingly , the design of the printer is pretty uncomplicated. It has average width for an A4 printer, but is considerably less deep than most. It uses HP’s trademark print path which takes paper from, in this case, a fold-down tray at the front and feeds it back out on top of the input stack. There is no output tray, but the technique is basic and works astonishingly well. As there’s no cover to the paper sheets, you’ll in all likelihood want to remove and store them when you’re not printing, which is a bit fiddly .
There’s no control panel on the printer and a single power button with an inset green LED shows when the machine is active. A single USB connection on the rear is the only way of getting data into the printer and a small, black block power supply provides low voltage power.
This printer uses two hp ink cartridges and they are numbered hp 300 colour and 300 black, there are high and low capacity versions available.
Speed wise, HP quote print speeds of up to 20 pages per minute, but these are draft mode speeds, so not in truth in the real world. We measured speed at about 4.5 pages per minute with our 5 page text document. .
The printer can take up to 18 seconds before starting to print the first page of a multipage job, so it’s not a great surprise that on a 20-page document, where initial processing is a smaller proportion of the whole, the print speed rises, in this case to 5.5 ppm .
The calibre of prints from the machine is very good. Black text is remarkably clean for an entry-level inkjet printer, with little ink bleed into the paper, so giving sharp and readable text, down to small point sizes .
Photo prints in best mode on good quality photo paper were very good especially at this price point. Colours were natural and plenty of detail was evident.
Using the XL version ink cartridges is the cheapest way to print as the standard capacity cartridges have very little ink capacity.
Verdict
This printer is good value for money . It’s very easy to use and in most ways just gets on with the job. Features are stripped away , but it’s reasonably quick for its class and produces high quality output. If money is tight, the Deskjet D1660 is a good place to spend it.
