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Review: Hewlett Packard 960Cse Inkjet Printer

Toronto Star Fast Forward column for April 26, 2001

The best laid columns...

I'd planned this column to be a review of Corel's WordPerfect Office 2002 Suite, but in my role as the bugmeister, I managed to find a biggie that made doing a review in time for the suite's official release on May 1 impossible. Corel said it had sent me the final shipping code, but that assessment may have been premature.

The company's techs are still working on it, and I expect them to tell me exactly what the bug is when they get it sorted out, but the upshot of it is that when I installed the suite on my Windows 2000 system, all of its parts - Quattro Pro 10, Paradox 10, Presentations 10, et. al - ran, except WordPerfect 10.

The latest update from Ottawa suggests that one of the program's core DLLs (dynamic link libraries) has a memory allocation problem. "We'll fix it, then make sure it gets onto the CDs in the final shipping version," said a company spokesperson. In the meantime, my review will have to wait until it works.

Sigh.

I'll have that in colour, please...

So, instead of WordPerfect, we'll turn our attention to Hewlett Packard's latest DeskJet printer. The 960Cse is the most recent in the 900 series. Like all of HP's recent inkjets, this one has flowing lines with softly curved edges. It comes in the two-tone light gray HP has chosen for its DeskJet printers. The paper tray and catch tray are integrated into the bottom/front of the unit, projecting forward like a pouting lip Paper is curved in the printing path, so that you print on the bottom of each sheet - something useful to know if you're choosing stock with only one good side, such as glossy photo paper. I've been watching for several years now as the various inkjet printer manufacturers have tweaked their inks and drivers to produce very good colour photos. It has become more difficult to find printers that don't do at least a good job and some of them, like the HP DeskJet 960Cse, are excellent. And that's without the special 5-colour "photo" ink cartridges.

Basic Specs...

The 960Cse is rated at 15 pages per minute (ppm) in black and white draft mode (5.7 ppm in normal and 1.3 ppm in "best" modes). HP rates it at 12 ppm for colour (again in draft mode, with 4.7 and 1.2 ppm in normal and best modes).

My test print, a colour photo, completed in 4.3 minutes, which is pretty quick compared to others I've sent the same picture (about half as long as the Lexmark Z82 reviewed here a couple of weeks ago, for example). Keep in mind that company reports on page print speed are based on an "industry standard" letter with five per cent page coverage in monochrome, and 15 per cent in colour - and that it's these "standards" that are used to calculate ink cartridge life, too.

With a duty cycle rating of 5,000 pages a month, it's suitable for a small business, but at the cost of ink replacements, better keep sales up. The integrated paper input tray has a capacity of 150 sheets of 20 lb stock, but the output bin that hovers above it can only take 50 sheets. For some odd reason, HP says it will only take 35 sheets if printing in draft mode.

There is no straight-path bypass. All media, including card stock, transparencies, labels, envelopes, and banner paper, to mention the more exotic types, feed through the main paper input tray. Minimum and maximum single-sheet sizes are 3 by 3 inches up to 8.5 by 14 inches. Our evaluation model came with a built-in duplexing module for automatic two-sided printing, but it's an optional extra above the base model.

Maximum resolution in monochrome is 600 dots per inch. Colour resolution, in best mode, using HP's PhotoREt technology and glossy photo paper, is 2400 by 1200 dpi. Connectivity includes parallel port for PCs (with a stern warning not try running the printer with a scanner or other device sharing the parallel port), and Universal Serial Bus (USB) for both PCs (running Windows 98 or 2000) and Macs.

HP's documentation says the printer can be shared over a network but, as with USB connectivity, only if you're running Windows 98 or Windows 2000. For some reason, the company seems to have forgotten about Windows Me, or just plain doesn't like it. The printer has 8 MB of memory (with no expansion option) and four built-in font families (CG Times, Univers, Courier, and Letter Gothic), but it's also True Type compatible, so you probably won't care. Ink comes in two cartridges, one black and one tri-colour with cyan, magenta, and yellow.

Performance Test...

I'm always amused by the way various USB-compliant products get installed. In this case, the startup poster clearly states that you must start by placing the driver CD into your computer first. However, the next instruction said to connect the printer while the driver software installation program was loading.

That led to a confused series of screens while Windows (98 SE in this case) first found the printer, then installed the USB drivers for it, before the install program finished coming up on screen.

Your printer probably won't have been in someone else's hands before you get it, like ours obviously was, so it's unlikely that the CD jewel case will be smashed, that the ink cartridges will already loaded and half-empty, or that the first message you see on screen is a warning that one of them hasn't been installed properly.

You'll also want to take advantage of the installation program's offer to put something called the HP Assistant on your desktop, because it's all the documentation you're going to get. There are only two thin paper manuals, one to give advice on network connections and another that essentially tells you what should have come in the box. All other instructions are loaded onto your hard drive.

In the meantime, a lot of what used to be manual operations have been automated in the 960Cse. For example, you can tell it what kind of paper you're loading, or you can set that task to "auto detect." Virtually every inkjet printer I've ever seen also has a multiple-stage and somewhat tedious calibration routine to line up the print heads properly. Instead, the 960Cse prints one page, then announces that it accomplished the calibration all by itself.

I mentioned that the unit complained its colour cartridge wasn't loaded properly and that brought to light another little feature. Normally, when you remove and replace a cartridge, modern inkjets know something has taken place and their driver software will query you as to whether you've installed a new one or simply replaced the old one. Not in this case. When I replaced the misaligned cartridge, the Toolbox application correctly divined that it was the old cartridge and gave me a "estimated" guess of how much ink was left.

Bottom line:

I noted earlier that the HP DeskJet 960Cse printed my test photo (and did a beautiful job, too) in about half the time that Lexmark's Z82 printer/copier/scanner did. But the comparison wouldn't be fair if I didn't also point out that the Lexmark significantly less expensive, too. I found it for as little as $299 at a couple of online sources, while the 960Cse carries price stickers ranging from $524.36 to $449.99 (at two sources). So, it pays to shop around.

More info at www.canada.hp.com or call1-800-387-3867

Contacting me