New printers and scanners give you a wider choice

By Zatni Arbi

JAKARTA (JP): Looking back, it is quite surprising how little I've used my printer since the beginning of the monetary crisis last year. In fact, as far as I can remember, my venerable HP DeskJet 1600C has been sitting idle for more than one month now. There's no question that the volume of my work has increased substantially, but thanks to our current ability to send files with E-mails and to fax directly from inside the PC, I can go far without ever needing to print.

However, there are definitely occasions that I really have to fight the urge to press the Ctrl-P keys to get a printout.

Reading Web pages on the bright screen, for example, is really taxing on my eyes. Therefore, when I have a lot of Web pages to read, I still have to print them out. Reading the printouts is much more comfortable than staring at the burning phosphors on the Cathode Ray Tube. All I know is that when the prices of toner come down or when we've become adjusted to the new prices, I will once again print reams of pages off the Web.

With the drop of the US dollar exchange rate against our rupiah, the price of the ink cartridges has actually dropped.

The last time I bought an ink cartridge for my wife's nephew's DeskJet 400C, the price was Rp 270,000 at Istidata. It's still more than three times the price we used to pay prior to the depreciation of our rupiah, but it's getting better.

Unfortunately, printing technologies are not waiting for our monetary crisis to come to an end. Early this month, the printer giant Hewlett-Packard unveiled a new line of interesting printers. And two new scanners, of course.

New DeskJets

Unlike inkjet printers from Epson or Canon, the range of inkjet printers available from Hewlett-Packard can be really confusing. Buyers usually find it hard to choose which model to buy because features and prices do not differ greatly from one model to the other.

Until recently it was quite clear that their cheapest DeskJet was the DeskJet 400C. It's not really a printer that I would recommend for use in an office, although a lot of people are doing just that despite the fact that HP calls it an entry-level printer. The DeskJet 400C is suitable for occasional printing -- both in black and white and color. Your daughter, for example, could print pictures of Barbie with this printer with no problem.

The DeskJet 400C has been replaced with DeskJet 420C, which has a more modern look and an increased paper tray capacity.

The new DeskJet 420C utilizes HP's traditional ColorSmart Technology that automatically selects the best color or grayscale tone for text and graphics elements. Text printing takes 20 seconds per page. What I like about this model is its compact design and paper tray that can be folded up to save even more space.

It's not for you if you're thinking of churning out a lot of printouts every day, though.

For students with printed assignments and personal projects such as posters and banners, the DeskJet 670C is the right model to choose.

This model has been complemented by the newer DeskJet 695C. The printing speed for this newcomer is 5 pages per minute (ppm) for black text and 1,7 ppm for color. It is capable of printing photos, but you will need the Photo Cartridge to do this. The special cartridge has six ink colors: Cyan, magenta, yellow, light cyan, light magenta and black. With this capability, this printer is great for the family or professionals who want to print in gorgeous colors once in a while.

One interesting feature of DeskJet 695C is that you can buy two different types of black ink cartridge. If you don't use it a lot, you can buy the cartridge with a smaller volume of black ink and save money. If you print a lot of text, you can buy the one with a larger volume of black ink.

For professionals with more demands, the more expensive DeskJet 720C is the right choice. A new DeskJet 710C has been added to complement DeskJet 720C, not to replace it. DeskJet 710C has a faster printing speed, 6 ppm for black text and 3 ppm for color images. This is also the right printer for home use.

Those of you who need a rather more heavy-duty printer at the office should probably choose the DeskJet 895Cxi. It is not yet available, but HP promises to start shipping this printer next month. The printing speed has been increased substantially to 10 ppm for black text and 6 ppm for color pages. This networkable printer is also ready for Universal Serial Bus (USB). Another important feature is, of course, the PhotoREt II Technology, which HP claims has the ability to blend tiny droplets of ink precisely to create photo-quality images.

If you need to print in A3 size you should go for the DeskJet 1120C, which has been around for some time. HP also has a professional inkjet printer, the DeskJet 2000C, although it is not yet available here in Indonesia.

New Scanner

Last time we looked at HP's ScanJet 5100C, which is intended for mainstream use. Two new scanners from the same company give us two interesting alternatives.

The ScanJet 4100C is the new low end model, although it's still a capable scanner. The most interesting thing about this great looking, low profile flatbed scanner is that it is the first one that uses the USB connection to your PC. If your PC is less than two years old, chances are that it already comes with a USB port, maybe two USB ports. However, if you don't have it, you can buy an expansion card that will add the new ports to your system.

ScanJet 4100 can also be equipped with an SCSI card, so if you for some reason refuse to use the USB alternative, you're still not out of luck. The SCSI card is optional and you have to buy it separately. The speed will be better with a SCSI connector as opposed to the USB.

The high-end scanner from HP, ScanJet 6100, has been replaced with ScanJet 6200 and 6250C. The difference between the two is that the latter has an integrated automatic document feeder, while with the former it is an option. Both scanners are networkable and have the ability to scan slides.

All scanners have 600 DPI optical scanning resolution, intelligent scanning software and 36-bit color processing. One striking thing to me is that, unlike my ScanJet IIC, they all come in a much smaller footprint. The scanning glass is not even long enough to scan a legal sized page. The good thing is, because the scanning head doesn't have to travel a long way, the scanning time is also reduced.

Printing and scanning technologies have truly come a long way. Unfortunately, the current economic conditions may not allow us to immediately enjoy the benefits they are able to bestow. Let's just hope that the crisis will be over soon so that once again I can print Web pages instead of hurting my eyes by reading them off the screen.