I have had our home printer for a couple years now and was finding myself very unhappy with it. It printed Ok. but it also seemed to have issues with running out of ink quickly; either that or the ink was drying up fast.
So, this past weekend, we decided to invest in a new printer to go with the new computer we recently purchased. After shopping around a bit, we ended up purchasing the Hewlett Packard Photosmart Printer/Scanner (Model #C4400). So far, we are happy with that purchase.
I primarily use our computer printer for two reasons; printing documents and, on occasion, printing a photo off of one of our digital cameras. So, when I went shopping for a printer, I was looking for something that could give me quality on both without going through ink every couple of weeks.
So far, the C4400 seems to be meeting those needs.
Once we set it up, the first thing we did was go through some of the test pages and were impressed with the quality; both on the text documents and on the one photo we printed. The photo, for example, looked like one you would get if you went to a store kiosk and printed the pictures off of your camera there. We even hung it up for everyone to see.
The scanner/copier feature on the printer also works great. Our other printer also had a scanner but the copies always seemed to be lighter than the original. You can’t tell the difference between the copy and original on this one.
The printer also doesn’t seem to go through ink very fast either. We have the starter cartridges in it now; which are expected to run out of ink quickly (which is why we bought replacement cartridges right away). But, even though we’ve been doing quite a bit of printing, they are still functioning fine.
One thing I love about the C4400 is the fact you can insert your camera’s memory cards right into the printer and print directly from that. This is actually handy considering our new computer doesn’t allow us to do that (a feature we actually miss from our old computer). You even have a little screen that helps you through the process.
The printer is compact, which allows us to keep it on top of our filing cabinet and doesn’t require us to find extra room in an already cramped computer area. Setting it up was also easy; though my wife and I did get confused for a bit when we saw the electrical cord was a little over a foot long (we later learned it attached to another cord and we didn’t really need an extension cord).
My only real complaint about this printer is it doesn’t hold a lot of paper. I’m only able to load a few sheets at a time (in the front, which is also a bit awkward), making it difficult to print larger documents.
However, compared to our last printer, I think the C4400 is a major upgrade and, at least for the time being, I’m very happy with my purchase.
