Hewlett Packard has a line of color printers for business – including “business Deskjets” that don’t turn up often at the neighborhood stores. They feature faster speeds and bigger paper trays than the home units, but they aren’t quite as well suited to printing photos as the amazing new home inkjet printers.
HP announced five new business printers today. Here’s the press release. The one that stands out is a color Laserjet at $999 – a remarkable price if you need high-speed color printing. I haven’t checked out the cost of toner cartridges – I assume money flies out of your wallet to keep the ink flowing, just like all the other color printers now.
The HP Deskjet 5550 still looks like a steal at $149. Some reviewers prefer the photos and the lower cost per page from Canon printers, but I hate the vertical paper feeds on the Canons. I’ve seen a lot of vertical paper feeds that have gone bad over the years, misfeeding pages left and right.
The HP Photosmart 7550 is pricey at $399, but it has some attractive features. It uses the same high quality print engine as the Deskjet 5550, with six-color ink cartridges that produce prints that supposedly won’t fade for 65 years. (No one knows how to test that.) There are three ink cartridges for these printers – black and white, color, and really really good “photo” color. The 5550 only holds two at a time – so you get either high quality black text or high quality photos, but not both at the same time. The 7550 holds all three at the same time, so there’s no cartridge swapping required. Plus there’s a built-in tray to hold 4×6 photo paper, slots for the various kinds of memory sticks, and a little LCD viewer to preview pictures directly from your camera.
