HP Officejet 6000 Printer series - E609

High-quality, reasonable printer with up to 40% less cost-per-page and energy use than lasers1. Prints specialized color quality documents, plus, delivers high-speed performance and includes Ethernet networking for greater productivity.

Features:

• Print professional color documents for up to 40% less cost-per-page and energy use than lasers2. With economical individual inks, you'll replace only the inks that require it. Plus, get more printed pages with optional high-capacity cartridges.

• Enjoy fast speeds up to 32 ppm black/31 ppm color (draft mode), and speeds equivalent to a laser printer with up to 7 ppm black/colour3. Share resources with built-in Ethernet, and handle high print volumes with the 250-sheet input paper tray.

• Print high-quality photos, cover pages, fliers, and other documents with borderless printing, and enjoy fast-drying documents, using papers with the ColorLok logo.

Dell Wasabi PZ310 Mobile Photo Printer

When Dell gave the Wasabi PZ310 Mobile Printer its distinctive name, it clearly wanted to convey the none-too-subtle message that it's hot. The name virtually begged for bad puns from reviewers who debated whether the printer was hot or not. Personally, I wish the folks at Dell had named it the Salsa, which would give me the choice of branding it mild, medium, or hot, in which case I'd call it medium.

The PZ310 is the second printer available in the U.S. to use ZINK technology. The first was the Polaroid Pogo Instant Mobile Printer. These two are the first examples of a really new category of printer, clearly separate from traditional small-format dedicated photo printers.

Small-format photo printers—like the Editors' Choice Epson Picture Mate Dash for example—are typically designed to print on a maximum of either 4-by-6 or 5-by-7 paper, and they are aimed at people who want to print photos at home that at least match drugstore-level photo quality. The Dell and Polaroid printers are limited to 2-by-3-inch photos and are aimed at anyone who wants the freedom to print pictures from their cameras and camera phones anywhere and anytime. Some suggest that the category will be particularly popular with teenagers, but I'd argue that these printers will appeal to gadget freaks of any age.

For both small-format printers and the new category of instant digital printers, the paper size determines how small the printer can be. The Picture Mate Dash, for example, is about the size of a lunch box and weighs about 5 pounds. Some printers in the category are a little smaller and lighter, but all weigh at least 2 or 3 pounds. In general, these small-format printers are small and light enough to be reasonably portable so that you can occasionally carry them to print pictures at special events. But you definitely wouldn't want to carry them with you all the time.

The instant digital printers, by difference, are much smaller and weigh only a few ounces each, so you can carry them with you virtually all the time—much like a cell phone. In fact, they are very pretty much designed as companions to camera phones and digital cameras. Polaroid, the inventor of the classic instant camera, also draws the parallel to its roots, pointing out that its ZINK-based printer offers the same functionality for digital photos as its film-based instant camera did for analog photos. 

The same is true of the Dell printer. You can take a picture, print it, and have it to look at, all in about 60 seconds. In short, if you miss your old Polaroid film-based instant-photo camera, you can recapture much the same experience with either the Dell or Polaroid ZINK-based printer.

When you are second to market with a new technology, as is Dell in this case, it helps to bring something new to the table so that you can stand out from the original. The Wasabi doesn't really do this—in fact, it's nearly identical in almost every way. Though not quite twins, the two are certainly close cousins.

HP Deskjet 1000

The advantage of doing without scanner, copier and all those extra features is that it keeps the price of your printer down, and the DeskJet 1000’s current price of just is hard to beat if you’re on a tight budget. Yet despite the low price the DeskJet 1000 actually performs pretty well.

Text quality is very good, with smoothly detailed text that would give a more luxurious laser printer a run for its money. The print speed was attractive good too – right on HP’s estimate of 5.5 pages per minute. Colored documents were somewhat slower at 3ppm, but that still makes it a match for many of its more expensive rivals.

Photo output on plain paper showed some very slight signs of banding, but wasn’t a problem when using the photo papers designed for this purpose. However, the 100 seconds printing time for a 4x6in postcard print makes it clear that the DeskJet is really only suitable for occasional photo prints.

That impression is confirmed by the DeskJet’s running costs. HP’s ink cartridges cost roughly the same as those of its rivals, but the page yields for those cartridges are definitely below average – less than 200 pages for simple black and white documents – and that pushes the printing costs up to almost 7p per page for black and white, and 17p per page for color documents. To be fair, HP does sell ‘XL’ cartridges and value packs that can cut those costs considerably, but it’s clear that the DeskJet 1000 is really just intended for home users with very light printing requirements.

Needless to say, as well as being a single function inkjet printer, the DeskJet 1000 has neither Wi-Fi nor a memory card slot for printing photos straight from a digital camera.

HP Photosmart Premium e-All-in-One C310a

HP’s Photo smart Premium e-All-in-One (C310a) is an inkjet multifunction with a letter-sized flatbed scanner with scans and copy capabilities. It also offers a long list of hot printing features, like 802.11 wireless printing, a 4.3-inch Touch Smart control screen, the capacity to download and use dozens of Internet printing apps, support for Apple’s Air Print, as well as HP’s own ePrinttechnology. Compared to the like-priced Epson Artisan 725 and Canon Pixma MG5220, the Photo smart Premium e-All-in-One is faster, but not quite as well equipped.

The Photo smart Premium uses five individual ink cartridges: cyan, magenta, yellow, black and photo black. The Photo smart Premium comes with special setup ink cartridges that actually have more ink than the standard ink cartridges. The extra ink in the setup cartridges is there to compensate for the ink used during the initial printer calibration.

The costs for replacement inks are just average; the standard-size cartridges include a 250-page, $12 black and 300-page, $10 cyan, magenta, and yellow. It all adds up to 14.8 cents per four-color page. High-yield supplies are significantly cheaper: The 800-page black costs $35, while each 750-page color costs $18, making for an 11.6-cent, four-color page. A fifth color, photo black, costs $10 for the standard size, which lasts for about 130 4-by-6-inch photos; the high-yield, 290-photo size costs $18.

It’s been a short time since I’ve reviewed an HP printer, and it seems that the software has been refined considerably—dumping fewer icons into the dock and giving more control over what appears where.

In our speed tests, the Photo smart Premium turned in remarkable results. It joined a pretty exclusive club of competitors who needed less than a minute to print our 10-page colorless text file in Word at normal settings. At the other end of the spectrum is our Adobe Photoshop test, a 22MB, letter-sized color photo printed at Best quality: the Photo smart Premium took about two and a half minutes to emerge—an above-average time.

The resulting print was of superior quality; colors were pleasing, with no visible dot patterns or banding, and good detail in darker areas. Choosing a lower-quality setting will, of course reduce the print time, but the quality suffers as a result. Interestingly, choosing Highest DPI print settings, while taking longer to print than the Best setting, did not make much of a difference in image quality. Text quality was also very good, with clean type filled in nicely, though we noticed that the edges were a bit soft.

HP Photosmart Premium e-All-in-One C310a

HP’s Photo smart Premium e-All-in-One (C310a) is an inkjet multifunction with a letter-sized flatbed scanner with scans and copy capabilities. It also offers a long list of hot printing features, like 802.11 wireless printing, a 4.3-inch Touch Smart control screen, the capacity to download and use dozens of Internet printing apps, support for Apple’s Air Print, as well as HP’s own ePrinttechnology. Compared to the like-priced Epson Artisan 725 and Canon Pixma MG5220, the Photo smart Premium e-All-in-One is faster, but not quite as well equipped.

The Photo smart Premium uses five individual ink cartridges: cyan, magenta, yellow, black and photo black. The Photo smart Premium comes with special setup ink cartridges that actually have more ink than the standard ink cartridges. The extra ink in the setup cartridges is there to compensate for the ink used during the initial printer calibration.

The costs for replacement inks are just average; the standard-size cartridges include a 250-page, $12 black and 300-page, $10 cyan, magenta, and yellow. It all adds up to 14.8 cents per four-color page. High-yield supplies are significantly cheaper: The 800-page black costs $35, while each 750-page color costs $18, making for an 11.6-cent, four-color page. A fifth color, photo black, costs $10 for the standard size, which lasts for about 130 4-by-6-inch photos; the high-yield, 290-photo size costs $18.

It’s been a short time since I’ve reviewed an HP printer, and it seems that the software has been refined considerably—dumping fewer icons into the dock and giving more control over what appears where.

In our speed tests, the Photo smart Premium turned in remarkable results. It joined a pretty exclusive club of competitors who needed less than a minute to print our 10-page colorless text file in Word at normal settings. At the other end of the spectrum is our Adobe Photoshop test, a 22MB, letter-sized color photo printed at Best quality: the Photo smart Premium took about two and a half minutes to emerge—an above-average time. 

The resulting print was of superior quality; colors were pleasing, with no visible dot patterns or banding, and good detail in darker areas. Choosing a lower-quality setting will, of course reduce the print time, but the quality suffers as a result. Interestingly, choosing Highest DPI print settings, while taking longer to print than the Best setting, did not make much of a difference in image quality. Text quality was also very good, with clean type filled in nicely, though we noticed that the edges were a bit soft.