Product Reviews

Over the past two years, inkjet technologies have come on in leaps and bounds, but things have slowed down recently. To keep themselves interested, manufacturers have begun investigating new areas and, in particular, have been attempting to lure more business users with the inkjet sell. Epson's Stylus Color 850 (reviewed issue 47, p123) and Lexmark's OptraColor 45n (reviewed issue 48, p158), the most recent probes to this new inkjet frontier, have now been joined by Hewlett-Packard's new 2000C printer. This device aims to provide businesses with laser-class quality and performance at personal printer prices and neatly plugs the gap between HP's DeskJet 890C (reviewed issue 38, p168) and the venerable Colour LaserJet 5 (reviewed issue 19, p115).

The 2000C's maximum resolution is still 600dpi but it differs radically from traditional inkjet printers as it uses a modular system where the ink cartridges and print heads are kept as separate units. The printer uses four pressurised cartridges, which hold 8cm3 of ink each and remain static underneath a hinged cover at the front of the printer. These are connected by tubes which are integrated with the standard ribbon-style cable that runs to the print head carriage. Internal smart chips monitor the supply activating a plunger on the relevant cartridge when it requires a refill. The chips in the cartridges also keep track of how much ink is left in the reservoirs and this information is sent to HP's ToolBox utility on the host PC. When either a print head or cartridge is reaching the end of its life the ToolBox notifies you so you can order a new one before running out.

In addition to this novel and useful design feature, the 2000C is capable of delivering the smallest size ink drop of any inkjet printer currently available. Each colour head can produce drops eight picolitres (pl) in volume, although the black head still delivers 35pl drops. And each head sports an impressive 304 nozzles.

Running costs are also impressive. HP offers two black cartridges with claimed 550-and 1,400-sheet capacities at five per cent coverage, costing £17 and £25 respectively. The cyan, magenta and yellow cartridges are each good for 1,750 sheets and cost £25 each. The black print

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head (£25) can handle 12,000 pages before you need to replace it, while the colour heads (£25) will last 24,000 pages. Text-only prints using the high-capacity cartridge come to a reasonable 1.98p per page - marginally more than Epson's Stylus Color 850 (reviewed issue 45, p160). However, where the 2000C scores heavily over the competition is with colour printing costs: a full page based on five per cent coverage per colour costs a very reasonable 6.5p.

The 2000C certainly looks far sleeker and feels better built for unfriendly office environments than its DeskJet stablemates. It's also better equipped with the standard paper capacity - 150 sheets of A4 - expandable by a further 250 sheets using an optional lower tray. A standard parallel port provides local connection, but unlike Epson's higher-end inkjets or Lexmark's OptraColor 45n, the 2000C can't accept an internal print server card and requires HP's optional JetDirect 300X external box for network connectivity.

Once installed, HP's driver offers plenty of features to play around with. Multiple pages can be printed on a single sheet and there's a manual duplexing feature for double-sided printing. You can also create posters up to 16 A4 sheets in size. The 2000C prints each page segment with crop marks leaving you to cut and glue the pages together.

After a few test prints it became apparent that the 2000C isn't a breakthrough in terms of plain paper printing. Text suffered from minor feathering, and larger areas of colour produced banding and blotching. On HP's own Bright White inkjet quality paper, however, the results were excellent, with virtually no stepping evident on the graduated fills of the PC Pro colour test. The larger black drop sizes were apparent, though, as it failed to resolve 0.1pt and 0.2pt size white gaps between solid black blocks. Complex vector graphics produced impressive results too, with super smooth fills, while photographic images showed realistic colours and high levels of detail.

I tested the 2000C on a Pentium/200 with 64Mb of memory running Windows 98 to test speed performance. A 15-page Word document in Econofast mode was completed in 113 seconds for 8ppm, while Best mode dropped this to a still impressive 5.8ppm. The standard 24-page PC Pro printer test, which features a variety of fonts and graphics, was produced at a speed of 5ppm in Econofast and 0.9ppm in Best. All in all, this is about on a par with Epson's Stylus Color 850 and significantly quicker than Lexmark's OptraColor 45n.

Ultimately, the HP 2000C looks like a competent choice for companies that want fast, high-quality colour printing and don't want to pay the earth for it. It's easily the best inkjet in its class, and at £600 represents very good value, especially when you consider the low running costs for colour.