Paul R. Potts
I’ve written before about my experience with my HP Business Inkjet 1100D printer. I was, for the most part, quite happy with it. However, recently the black printhead failed.
The Business Inkjet design separates the ink cartridge from the print heads. One would think that this might reduce waste and cost. The ink cartridges still cost a lot of money, though. The idea was that the print heads would last much longer than the ink cartridge — thousands and thousands of pages. According to PC World, “HP estimates that the black print head will last for 16,000 pages, and the color print heads for 24,000 pages each.”
Well, that didn’t happen. I haven’t kept a page count, but I haven’t even finished a second ream of paper, and a few 25-packs or 50-packs of photo paper. I doubt I’ve printed more than 2,000 pages.
Now, when an ink cartridge fails, you can still print; you’ll just lose a color. Of course, if this is black, that can be a big inconvenience, but ink cartridges are usually in stock at office supply chains. However, when the print head fails, you can’t print a single page: the printer just refuses to do anything. I found out the hard way that because they supposedly last such a long time, the chain stores don’t carry the print heads; they are a special-order item. The salesperson at Office Max was quite surprised when I brought back my print head, and tested it out in another printer. It was kaput. And just out of warranty. And my printer was completely out of commission, while I had to wait a week for the new print head to arrive.
So, I have reservations about recommending the 1100/1200 series printers. There is the irregular print area on the back of the page versus the front when duplexing. Although color photos can look pretty stunning on expensive photo paper, printing out grayscale photographs results in pictures that look greenish.
Maybe my print head failure was just an anomaly, but the cost of replacing printheads and ink cartridges is starting to add up. Are there any decent, reliable inkjet printers that produce fast and sharp text, excellent photos, and that aren’t obscenely expensive to operate? The reviews of the 1200D I’ve seen are not encouraging – it seems that it is not an improvement over the 1100D model, so I probably don’t want to pick one up for my mom, although that was the model I was considering. I’ve always been an HP fan, but is it time to consider another manufacturer?
(My 1100 can duplex, but this is a feature I’ve rarely used, so I would not consider it an important selling point. Ethernet, however, would be welcome, since trying to share the printer with my Airport Express has led to poor results, including a lot of photo print jobs that stalled out and failed; this does not seem to be HP’s fault, though).