HP DeskJet 350CBi review

As technology gets smaller and faster, it seems we can now do anything on the move. The portable printer market has been championed by Canon for a fair few years now, and while ignored by Epson and Lexmark, HP has also entered the arena with the follow up to its 340 series - the rather swish looking DeskJet 350CBi.

Out of the box you can tell that HP has really gone to town on design: with its stylish dark-blue and grey chassis, the 350CBi will look great next to any notebook. Designed with portability in mind, it takes up very little space with its paper feed supports folding neatly out from the back.

Installation was reasonably simple - installing a cartridge is as easy as pressing a button and pushing it in. Unlike the Canon BJC-85 (reviewed issue 67, p161) with its four-colour mechanism and optional mono cartridge, the 350CBi restricts you to either a black or three-colour setup. With the black cartridge installed, the black text results were quite impressive, with deep black and surprisingly clear characters, although they were noticeably scratchy. It was also reasonably quick, turning out an average of 2.1ppm. However, the printer's closest rival, the Canon BJC-85, managed a superior 2.7ppm on the same task and also produced better quality results. Having said that, the HP is cheaper, and the text results are still usable by most standards.

Installing the three-colour cartridge was like travelling back several years in inkjet technology. Restricted to just three colours, black becomes a badly interpreted composite with obvious coloured dots enhancing the overall grainy look. This became worse when reproducing greys, giving a solid block the appearance of television snow, with bright colours spread unevenly and little trace of fully-composed grey. The colour graduation tests produced an uneven spread of coloured dots in wavy lines that should have been smooth fades through each colour transition. Even solid colours were incredibly grainy, with the lighter colours amplifying the flaw further. Not only was the quality nowhere near up to scratch, but the 350CBi took much longer to print anything in colour, averaging out at 0.15ppm for a simple six-page DTP document. These results are particularly disappointing when compared to those produced by the Canon BJC-85, which are simply leaps and bounds ahead.

Despite its claim of 600 x 300dpi, the 350CBi still struggled to reproduce a 150dpi pattern. Straight black lines were reproduced as shaky rows of multicoloured dots, which also filled in some of the gaps, making it difficult to distinguish the lines in a very simple pattern. By comparison, while the Canon BJC-85 also struggled on this task, it reproduced the patterns more faithfully.

The Canon BJC-85 also took a new step for the portable inkjet, with its ability to print photos. While there was an optional photo cartridge, the standard colour cartridge also performed admirably and printed on thick glossy photo media. While the results were impressive for a portable, by other standards they were still relatively modest, with obvious banding and track-marks. The HP DeskJet 350CBi also has an optional photo cartridge, but there are no options for photo media in the driver, the closest option being HP Professional Brochure and Flyer Paper, which is thin and glossy on both sides. The photo results themselves were poor and, like the colour tests, were akin to regressing by several years in technology. They were grainy with multicoloured speckles and no subtlety to the colours. The overall effect was dismal, making photo-printing a complete waste of ink and expensive paper.