hewlett packard

This printer is a great choice for a home office/hobbist.
It prints up to 4800dpi (good enough for most color prints)
and I especially like the built in duplex mode for printing manuals. The ink refills are expensive (most are) but last a reasonable amount of time. But for $199....a great buy.

Later, I plan on purchasing a separate printer for just color photos (dedicated printers are the best way to go). For now, this one does just fine for the price.

I'm a Division Director and purchased the HP Inkjet 1100 for my office. I'm required to produce correspondence such as business letters, letters to the general public, and interoffice memos. I've owned numerous printers, both laser and inkjet. This is my favorite. The question is "how do you plan to use the output from the printer?" If you want business quality text for letters/memos and office quality color for printing slides or articles from the web printed quickly in relation to other inkjets, this printer is superb. If your aim is to print highly detailed photographs, there are better alternatives.

I love the two paper trays - a luxury to which I'm unaccustomed from other inkjet models. I store our organization's letterhead in one tray and plain paper in the other. You switch back and forth between the trays by clicking on "Properties" from the Print Menu that is revealed after clicking on "Print". The option of duplex printing (printing on both sides) is also standard on the printer using the same procedure referenced above.

The printer comes with 4 separate high capacity print heads and 4 separate ink cartridges, one each for black, magenta, yellow, and cyan. This allows you to replace only what is needed. I saw the reference to the print heads below. They have a capacity life and are only replaced when worn out. From the web, I found that the black print head needs replacing after 16,000 pages and the other three (magenta, yellow, cyan) after 24,000 pages. You'll go through a lot ink cartridges before the print heads need replacing. When that happens, the print heads are no more expensive than a standard ink cartridge.

I am highly satisfied with this printer. Again, it all depends on how one intends to use it. For business and home use: printing correspondence, presentation slides, spreadsheets, webpages and web quality graphics, I find this an exceptional product with good printing speed. Of course, that's why it's marketed using the name HP 1100 "BUSINESS" inkjet. If you're into photography, you might look elsewhere.

I bought this to unit replace a dead Lexmark Z53. It looked larger and more solid than the dirt-cheap printers; I calculated that perhaps this one would also not eat expensive ink cartridges as fast as those do. It also has separate printheads and ink cartridges for each of the four colors, which can allegedly save some money. I'll be printing articles, resumes, letters, and maybe the rare book-length document, but not massive numbers of pages.

Around this price range you can get either a really low-end laser printer or a higher-end inkjet. I was considering both options and finally decided I'd like to have something from the mid-to-upper end of the technology's available lineup rather than one from the bottom of the barrel. I am quite satisfied with the unit so far; but because I haven't printed thousands of pages yet, consider this review a bit preliminary.

Setup is not very difficult, but if you've never set up this kind of hardware before, it might seem a bit dismaying. There are a lot of tape strips to remove, a somewhat unusual fold-out clamp to hold the printheads in place, and not-all-that-clearly-marked internal foam block to remove. The wordless poster that comes with the unit is adequate, although some of the drawings are not very clear, and the larger paper tray shown on the poster did not come with my version (the 1100d). It is available as a separate option, but I probably won't bother; you might want one if the standard 150-sheet tray sounds inadequate.

If you've set up an inkjet before it should not be difficult. This printer seems to have an optical sensor it can use to calibrate itself -- you can watch as a little light illuminates the test page it is printing -- and it seems to have done a good job! I was pleasantly surprised. I did wind up reinserting the black printhead more firmly to try to correct some lightness and banding visible on the test page. It seems to have done the trick -- or maybe it is just "broken in" after a few pages -- and I'm quite satisfied with the print quality.

Driver selection was automatic, and when I plugged in the USB cable and opened MacOS X 10.3's Printer Setup Utility, it had already chosen the driver. I never actually inserted the driver CD. That's actually more due to Apple than to HP, but I was impressed anyway.

This inkjet is also unusual because it has a duplexing unit. It holds the page to dry for a moment, then pulls it back in, passes it through the duplexer to flip it, and and prints on the other side. There is a price to pay for this paper-handling, though. The effective top margin on the back of the page is Iarger than it is on the front (when I print the printer's PDF file brochure, the very top of the content on the back side of the page is cut off).

The full user manual mentions that when printing for duplexing, you will want a minimum top margin of 0.46 inches. This is significantly bigger than the 0.12 inches the unit is capable of on the first side. It also looks like there may be a tendency to slightly misalign the vertical spacing of front and back. Keep this in mind if you intend to print double-sided brochures; the unit apparently has some basic physical limitations on what it can do with the second side that don't apply to the first side.

It should be noted that this is not truly a photo printer: it is not "full bleed" (it can't print right to the edges of the paper). It does a reasonable job, though; I tried a 450 dpi, 3150x1970 pixel image, on HP bright white inkjet paper, and it looked OK; under a magnifier I can notice, up close, some very fine dithering artifacts here and there (distinct from JPEG-compression artifacts).

I next tried the same image on Epson glossy photo paper. If you tell the print driver that you are printing on not just any photo paper, but specifically one of the seven specific types of HP photo papers, an extra print quality option appears: "Maximum DPI." I took a guess and said that my paper matched "HP premium plus photo paper, glossy." I chose "Maximum DPI."

The result does look subtly different than the result on HP's bright white paper; the colors are more saturated, and the dithering used to reproduce fine variations in shading look more like smooth blends. It is difficult for me to tell how much of the improvement, if any, comes from the driver's "Maximum DPI" setting and how much comes from the different ink-absorbing properties of the photo paper. In any case, the output on photo paper looks very nice. I can't guarantee that a professional photographer making fine-art prints would be satisfied, but you will probably be satisfied.

I also learned the hard way that on this unit, unlike the Lexmark Z53, the paper is flipped during printing: photo papers should go in the tray with the glossy side down! This is another detail mentioned in the user manual -- but note, this "manual" is not in the box; it is on the enclosed driver CD-ROM.

I guess HP has decided that since people don't read manuals, they won't bother with one, and instead they include only the setup poster and very minimal "Getting Started Guide." I don't think it is too cynical to imagine that they don't include a printed user manual so that we'll be inclined to print it out ourselves, thus getting a head start using up some of that expensive HP ink.)

Anyway, so far I'm quite satisfied. Unlike the dirt-cheap inkjets, or the weird-looking multi-function devices, this one seems reassuring: a larger footprint, a little more weight, and a more solid feel. I am taking off one star only for the somewhat slightly disappointing duplexing and documentation; if you're the type who doesn't read manuals anyway, and you don't need perfect double-sided printing with maximum print area on both sides, these details won't bother you.