HP Office Jet Pro k550 Inkjet Printer

Thursday, March 09, 2006

Price: Rs 80,000 (2 yrs warranty)

Key Specs:752 MB RAM, 80GB HDD, multi format DVD writer

Contact: ASUSTek Computers, Mumbai. Tel: 022-40058894. Email id: info_india@asus.com.tw  RQS# E26 or SMS 130326 to 9811800601

The HP Office Jet Pro k550 is yet another inkjet printer that has been pitched against the entry-level laser printers. The claim  is on account of the low cost per page, much like HP's Business Inkjet 1000 model we reviewed earlier. We received the base model for review.  The installation is easy. It has a USB 2.0 port and 32 MB memory.  The printer performed pretty well in speed tests. It managed printing a draft quality text document in less than 3.5 secs. When testing for text quality, we could easily read a point 2 regular text in Times New Roman. It managed to print a full-page gray scale graphics image in 16 secs in Best Quality mode, with no apparent banding. But in normal mode, we did notice a faint banding. Moving to color, the printer took just under 30 secs to print a full-page color photograph on 173 g/m2 photo paper. It fared far better than the Business Inkjet 1000, which took 101 seconds. The image quality was also very good. This can be attributed to the software as well, which provides various options for managing image quality print out. To test the cost effectiveness, we emptied the entire black cartridge by printing multiple copies of a document in grayscale only. Our document had sufficient text, a small graphic and a table. For us, 1240 pages exhausted 40 ml of ink. Thus, a 58.5 ml cartridge would print around 1800 pages. The cartridge costs Rs 1,500, bringing the price per page to under Re 1, better than the Business Inkjet 1000,  that recorded Rs 1.50. Note that the color cartridges cost Rs 1,000 a piece. These are the results for a normal quality print. So the cost would drop down for draft-mode printing. While the results might vary from those by HP itself as we used a different document, the scores are excellent for an inkjet.

Bottom Line: Real value for money product that would cater to the needs of all organizations. Even more attractive is the price tag of each color cartridge.

Anadi Misra

Page(s)   1