DeskJet 1600C: New standards in color printing

Mon, 27 Nov 1995

By Zatni Arbi

JAKARTA (JP): Let's face it: The age of black and white printouts is clearly over. Nowadays you can buy a cheap inkjet printer and chances are it will be color capable. All you'll need to do is spend a little more money on the so-called "color kit" and, presto, you're printing in color! The Nov. 7, 1995 issue of PC Magazine reports that no new black-and-white-only inkjet printers were launched this year. If you read my recent roundup of HP products, you should be aware that even the lowest-end inkjet printer from this printer giant, DeskJet 400, comes with a color option.

For nearly a year the world-wide sales of inkjet printers have exceeded the sales of dot matrix and laser printers combined. Inkjet technology has improved tremendously, its speed has increased and the price now easily competes with letter-quality dot matrix printers. The only reason people still buy dot matrix printers is because they have lower operating costs. They also can print on multi-part forms, which neither the inkjet nor the laser printers can.

However, as far as color quality is concerned, low-cost color printers won't give you stunning color output, though it may be acceptable for most purposes. In any case, the color printout is far better than the ones you used to get from a Citizen or Epson color dot-matrix printer just two years back.

On the highest end of the family of color printers, you could buy a color laser printer. In one of my articles several months ago I gave a report on the three color laser printers from Xerox, QMS and HP that appeared on the market at about the same time. Today we have more of them (six, according to the article in PC Magazine) but their prices remain out of reach for most. The HP Color LaserJet, for instance, carries a price tag of around Rp 16 million locally.

Fortunately, in between the two extremes we have plenty of choices. If printout size is your main consideration, Epson has brought us what is probably the first B-size color inkjet printer, the Stylus Pro XL. Lexmark has followed suit with its A3 capable JetPrinter 4079 Plus. If quality of color printout is what you're after, the choice is even greater.

If you have been following my articles, you'll know that I have been using the HP DeskJet 1200C color inkjet printer for more than one year. Though it deserves much praise, it is now back with its real owner.

I have just acquired my new baby, the DeskJet 1600C, for my DTP activities. Ever since its birth, this particular printer has earned rave reviews from computer magazines, including PC/Computing, Windows and PC Magazine. Having read so much about it, I felt confident enough to make the investment of more than Rp 3 million. And, so far, it has lived up to my expectations.

By the way, the picture of HP DeskJet 1600C that you see in the accompanying illustration was taken with the Logitech Pixtura digital camera which I reviewed two weeks ago. Not bad, is it?

Features

I have reported on this premium color inkjet printer twice in this column. The first was when it appeared for the first time in one of the computer magazines I was reading, and the second time when I did the HP roundup about a month ago. You'll find a complete list of its features if you go back to those articles.

However, here are some important highlights: The printer comes standard with 4 MB of RAM. When I printed a page of a PageMaker 5.0 brochure, which was full of tiled fills and scanned photos, this amount of RAM proved insufficient. The printer printed "Not enough printer memory" on the bottom of the page, and it failed to print all the photos. So I added another 4 MB of RAM, which cost me about Rp 360,000, and it worked flawlessly. In fact, the quality of the printout was noticeably better than that of my old favorite, the DeskJet 1200C.

Unlike the DeskJet 1200C, the 1600C has only one multi- function button on its front panel. Everything, including the print mode, the ColorSmart enhancement, and on-line/off-line switch, is controlled through the software, which comes in three 3.5" diskettes. The multi-purpose button functions as the self- test button, resume button, manual feed, etc., depending on what situation you're in.

During my test, I deliberately took out the magenta ink cartridge to see how the bi-directional communication between the printer and my PC worked. Sure enough, the Printer Status monitor window popped up and instructed me to take out and re-insert the magenta cartridge. I did as I was told, and the monitor instructed me to put down the printer cover. Only after I followed the instructions did the monitor inform me that the printer was ready. The straightforward diagram shown in the window is clear enough to tell any non-English speaker what he's supposed to do. It's amazing how printers can be made to talk back to us.

The HP ColorSmart technology is pretty smart too. It can detect whether our print job consists of text, business presentation using spot color, or graphic images using continuous color tones, and print accordingly. If you're adventurous enough, you can experiment with ColorSmart by manually changing the printed color control; you can tell the printer to use vivid colors, to match the screen or to print without any adjustment whatsoever. The half-toning method can also be adjusted to achieve the best result. And, yes, the printer can also be calibrated to match the screen. The procedure takes only about one minute to complete.

At the back of the printer there is a slot for feeding envelopes, labels or letterhead. The tray can hold up to 180 sheets of plain paper. The printout fall on the receiving tray faces up in the wrong order, so you may want to tell your application to print out in the reverse order--particularly if you're printing a long document.

Heavy-duty

The printer is rated for 12,000 print cycles a month, which means that you can push it to its limits to churn out almost 500 pages a day. Not many people would have the heart to do that. According to an informal test done by PC/Computing, the DeskJet 1600C prints color 30 percent faster than the DeskJet 1200C.

Talk about speed, this printer prints up to nine pages of black and white text per minute, although it's rated at 8 ppm. Despite such a high speed, the printer doesn't shake as much as the DeskJet 1200C. Monochrome printout comes at 600 DPI, and with HP's proprietary Resolution Enhancement Technology, or RET, the edges are very smooth and the text looks crisp. Color printout comes at 300 DPI. While it may sound out of date when compared with Epson Stylus Color's 720 DPI, HP ColorSmart technology makes this difference in DPI virtually meaningless.

If the need arises, I can add a PostScript SIMM to the printer later. I can further add the JetDirect I/O card, and this DeskJet 1600C will become a DeskJet 1600CM. The JetDirect card enables me to connect this printer through LocalTalk or Ethernet connection with a PC and Mac network.

Final word

The biggest complaint that I have is that it still cannot print on paper larger than legal size. According to HP, they still have no intention of making a B-size inkjet printer in the near future.

In addition to the print size limitation, the warm-up and power-on test procedure produces a funny noise not heard from the DeskJet 1200C. I still don't know whether the noise is typical of this printer or whether something is not quite right with this unit.

Unlike the steel-cased DeskJet 1200C, the printer top cover is made of hardened plastic, so I have to be careful not to put heavy stuff on it -- which, unfortunately, happens to be one of my habits.

Apart from the above glitches, this printer will certainly do my presentation proud. The colors are brilliant, particularly if I use the glossy paper specially made by HP for color printers. Black and white text rivals many of the current laser printers. In fact, I no longer know what to do with my perfectly-good HP LaserJet 3P now that I can print text at a lower cost and at a higher speed with this new printer.

If you want to save some money, however, run immediately to Glodok Plaza and buy one of the remaining HP 1200Cs. The DeskJet 1200C costs much less and its print quality is still outstanding. Beware, though, the DeskJet 1200C comes standard with only 2 MB of RAM, so you'll need to add another Rp 800,000 to buy 8 MB additional RAM to make it really fly.

Individual users

If you don't want to spend that much on a color printer, but you want high quality color printout, you could opt for what HP has targeted as a personal color printer for individual users. The DeskJet 850C costs about one-third less than the DeskJet 1600C, while the print quality is basically the same. Unfortunately, it is non-expandable and slower, two rather significant drawbacks.

One tip for you if you buy a DeskJet 1600C and intend to move it around and use it with different PCs instead of connecting it to a network: You had better put all three software diskettes in a plastic bag and tape it to the inside of the top cover. You'll definitely need to have the software driver installed before you can use the printer optimally. I still remember the frustration of the people who borrowed the DeskJet 1200C but forgot to ask for its printer driver.

Finally, here's one general tip for choosing a good color inkjet printer: For the best color print quality, you should avoid models that use three inks only -- cyan, magenta and yellow. Better quality prints come from printers that have all four ingredients, which are those three plus black ink.

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