Product Reviews

The Deskjet 6980 is HP's latest inkjet for small businesses and home offices. At first glance, you can see that it hasn't been designed specifically for home users wanting to print holiday snaps. There's no LCD screen and no card reader, so printing directly from a camera's memory card isn't an option. In addition, you only get four inks as standard, whereas most photo printers use six.

While HP hasn't optimised the 6980 for photo printing, it has gone the extra mile to make the printer as office-ready as possible. As well as a USB connector, the 6980 has 802.11g wireless

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and Ethernet adapters built in, so setting up the printer to work over a network was simple.

Print quality was very good. Text documents were flawless - the characters were crisp, black and well defined, and as good as a laser printer's. Even at the lowest quality setting, fast draft, documents were good enough to be used in business correspondence. The quality of colour prints on plain paper was excellent, graphics were bright and graduations in tone were properly rendered. The 6980 didn't make as good a job of photos as a six-ink printer would, but our test prints were still sharp and bright.

The 6980 printed fast too - at normal quality, it managed an impressive 6ppm, rising to 11ppm at the fast draft setting. Our A4 photo printed in 3 minutes and 16 seconds. Text costs 3.5p per page, which is reasonable, but not outstanding, while colour came in at only 5.5p per page, which is particularly good value.

The Deskjet 6980 is a bit of a niche product - that's why it gets a Recommended award and not a Best Buy. If you're running a small business or home office and you want a single printer for text, photos and graphics, the 6980 is for you.