HP DeskJet 950C

A quick glance at this HP DeskJet and you'd be forgiven for thinking that it's already been reviewed in PC Pro, bearing more than a passing resemblance to the DeskJet 970Cxi (reviewed issue 61, p156). It is, however, the latest in HP's long line of DeskJet printers, and is another important weapon in the company's battle for dominance in the inkjet market.

The 950C was introduced alongside the DeskJet 930C to plug any gaps in the inkjet printer market. The 950C is second in line to the top-of-the-range 970Cxi, whose suggested retail price is £80 more. As a result of the 950C's cheaper price, its features, when compared with the 970Cxi, have been curtailed. For example, the 970Cxi's ingenious duplex add-on unit, which allows you to print both sides of a sheet, isn't supplied. Although they share a common physical form, which is quite distinctive to HP, they also differ in chassis dimensions.

I attempted to set up the DeskJet 950C using its USB interface with HP's latest supplied drivers for the review unit, which were written at the beginning of December 1999. The front end didn't have a USB install option, and instead referred me to the printed instruction poster to set up the printer. HP's recommended five-step quality evaluation cites 'installation and setup' as the first step. So I was rather amused to find that I'd been supplied with an installation poster that was printed in German. Although I eventually managed to decipher it,.the USB installation turned out to be awkward, and after several attempts and subsequent failures I was no longer amused. I reverted to using the time-honoured and trusted parallel port method. This enabled communication first time to the Pentium II/266 test PC, which was fitted with 64Mb of system memory.

The DeskJet 950C is aimed at what HP terms 'the photo enthusiast' who requires 'a fast photo printer? with two paper trays'. The main tray has a capacity of 100 sheets combined with an extra chamber to accommodate up to 20 sheets of 4 « 6in glossy snapshot photo paper. The dpi rating is 600 for black ink and a maximum 2,400 « 1,200 in colour by applying HP PhotoREt III, a colour layering technology. HP also proudly boasts that the DeskJet 950C's printing mechanism has 300 black and 408 colour ink nozzles with firing frequency (ink squirts per second) of 12kHz and 18kHz, respectively. But don't be blinded by the science. At the end of the day it's how fast and at what quality the print sample hits the output tray that really counts. PC Pro always applies the most comprehensive, 'click to drop' test. The stopwatch starts when a print command is given and stops when the sample drops into the out tray. Running the DeskJet 950C through its paces, I subjected it to PC Pro's standard print tests for both speed and quality. The 25-page text-only test took seven minutes, 22 seconds to average a print speed of 3.4ppm at default normal settings, which is 1.7ppm short of HP's quoted 5.1ppm. The text and colour graphics test inevitably took longer with a timing of two minutes, 43 seconds, equating to 1.5ppm and falling short of the 3.6ppm claimed. Faster speeds of up to 11ppm can be achieved, but this is at the expense of print quality since draft mode is implemented.

The text print quality on plain 64g/m2 copy paper is very sharp. HP inkjets have always performed well as far as printing text is concerned, and this new addition to the DeskJet family is excellent. The pigment ink is absorbed cleanly onto unconditioned copy paper so that no jaggies are evident, even close up. The depth of the black is also good, making the text appear very solid. So to the PC Pro colour performance test, which produced a lively range of solids and shades. There was a problem with pure black blocks on 64g/m2 plain copy paper though. The DeskJet 950C placed so much ink on the page that it couldn't absorb any more and required drying time before it could be handled without smudging. This didn't occur when using HP's bright white inkjet paper, which helps to improve the intensity of the colours. Banding is nevertheless discernible on close scrutiny but colour blending was dealt with well, as it was reasonably smooth through the transition of shades.