HP Deskjet 5550c

Author's product rating:   

Picture quality	Excellent
Printing speed	Slow
Colour sensitivity	Good
Ease of use	Very easy
Value For Money	Excellent

Advantages:	Excellent value for such high print quality
Disadvantages:	Too new to have cheaper alternative sources for the ink cartridges

Recommend to potential buyers:

yes

Full review

Having just got back from my first all-digital holiday, photo-wise, that is, I’ve been spending the last couple of days tidying up my collection of digital photos of New York – you know the kind of thing, straightening horizons of landscapes taken after the bars closed, altering the verticals so the Empire State Building won’t look like it’s failing over backwards. Then of course you have to re-title each .jpeg file so that you will be able to tell what it is just by looking at its name, not some bloody great long serial number allocated by the camera in the first place!

That done, I set about printing a few off. Ironically, the larger prints, i.e. the A4 sized ones were sharper than the postcard sized. Contrary to your expectations based on experience of TV, up to a certain size, the pictures do actually get sharper. There is a good reason for this. Unlike a TV, where the 625 lines (actually closer to 480 in reality) get smaller along with diminishing screen size screen, the limiting factor when printing is the maximum definition of the printer. In the case of my current printer (well up to yesterday it was my current printer), this is 1440 dots per inch. So, in the ridiculous case of a thumbnail sketch 1 inch wide, the whole width of picture would be defined by a mere 1440 dots, whereas at A4 size, it would be treated to about 12 times that amount.

Of course, pictures any larger than this start to show the shortcomings of the digital source, i.e. the camera, but my new Nikon is a 5-megapixel job, so I’m safe for a good couple of years at least before the upgrade bug bites again!

Since I had no intention of printing every damned photo I take at A4 size, something had to give if I wanted high definition postcard sized prints, besides which it was January Sale Time (probably the only time worth spending money in PC World, he said, holding up a crucifix and garlic)!

My existing Epson 600 has given sterling service, and in fact it still works properly on “unofficial” cartridges bought cheaply off the Internet. As a side issue, the opinion I wrote on the Epson 600 has grossed 555 reads, not from members (dammit!), but I guess this is a measure of how much Ciao gets used by outsiders seeking opinions, particularly on white goods and computer hardware.

In the five years since I bought a printer, maximum definitions have rocketed, and it was with great pleasure that I realised that for £60 less than I paid for “old faithful”, i.e. £100 exactly, I could get a 4800 dots per inch printer, the Hewlett-Packard 5550. Further perusal of PC World reveals some printers claiming 5760 dots per inch.

FIRST IMPRESSIONS

I know cosmetics shouldn’t really come into it, but it did look smart, sitting there in a tasteful light metallic-blue and grey (this is the 5552 derivative, but the instruction book makes on differentiation between this and the more curvaceous 5550 i I suspect that they have the same innards - they certainly run on the same software and ink cartridges). Technology isn’t all that has moved on since buying my ivory-coloured Epson.

It is also quite compact, having more or less the same footprint as the Epson, but can be placed nearer the wall, because the loaded paper sits at the front only to be pulled into the machine and spewed out over the top of the supply tray when finished. You CAN put stiffer media into the machine by opening a drop-down tray at the back, but even the thin card I occasionally use runs OK from the front tray.

INSTALLATION

This is pretty easy. Firstly I rebooted my PC to delete the existing Printer details and removed any Epson printer utilities.

Contrary to what you would expect to be the sequence, you run the install CD-ROM first, followed by making the physical connections to the mains, and one of either the USB port or the Parallel printer port.

Niggle No. 1 – Neither type of computer lead is supplied, which to my mind is like taking delivery of a car, and then having it towed to a petrol station because some petrol wasn’t included in the price. Hewlett-Packard isn’t alone here, but why, oh why, do they all do this?

Fitting the two supplied ink cartridges was easy, and they are clearly marked, which is just as well because they are the same size. The triple-colour cartridge sits in the left hand bay, and the black in the right hand.

The test print ran just fine with excellent blacks (from the proper black cartridge, that is), sharp overall print qulaity and a very fair postcard-sized photo included in the workout. I was up and running in minutes.

You also have the option of replacing the black with another Photo-Quality colour cartridge to enrich the existing palette. Of course, PC World didn’t have it in stock, surprise, surprise, but having tracked one down at the diametrically-opposed Currys, (i.e. they're only over the road!), I've put the 6-colour set-up to the test. Frankly, there's not a huge uplift in quality, and if I'd never been told about the "photo quality" ink, I'd have been more than happy with the "3-colours + black" set-up. True, reds and yellows are a tad more vibrant but that's about it. Leaving the photo cartridge in does however mean that whatever you do, black will always be a composite affair, there being no on-board supply of real black at that point. Therefore, if your printer is to be your general workhorse, then change back to black once you have done with photo printing, otherwise you'll be depleting precious colour supplies just to print text! Curiously, the Photo Colour cartridge is cheaper than the normal colour job, and yet, the same cubic capacity. As our US friends say, "go figure!"

One quirk that will take getting used to, is that the paper has to go into the supply tray face down, as it gets turned upwards through 180 degrees and starts coming back out again when being printed. This is “pure HP” and their ink jets and FAXES have run like this for years. It’s just that this is my first HP printer.

Likewise, there’s to be no peeking. With my Epson, I could lift the lid and peer at the slowly emerging image (very slowly at maximum definition). No such fun with the HP. Lifting the lid halts the machine but does no damage to the printing when replaced!

PICTURE QUALITY

Of course, with only my Epson to compare with, the HP 5550 is excellent. There is no discernable trace of “banding”, i.e. lines of print prominent mainly in large expanses of sky and sea, even with a magnifying glass. Colour using only the normal cartridges is excellent and to my eye, realistic. I wonder whether using the “black bay” up for this extra Photo cartridge is justified, especially since this will mean that precious colour inks get used to make up a composite black when black is wanted.

One thing I do know already though – smaller pictures are much clearer with better skin tones. Some of my 1440 d.p.i. shots were making us look a bit “ruddy-cheeked” even before we’d touched the mulled wine!

FEATURES

As well as its ability to print at 4800 d.p.i., the HP 5550 can print right to the edge of some paper sizes (4"x6" photo papers mainly) obviating the need for a guillotine.

Niggle No. 2 – I have a small stock of Panoramic Paper, intended for my Epson. This is A4 width but twice the normal length. Epson printer drivers allow you to choose this size from a list.

“Never mind”, I thought, “the HP 5550 will have a 'User Defined' setting that I can adjust”. Well, yes and no really. Yes it is adjustable, but no, not to 594 mm long! 355mm is the limit, which only makes it 58mm longer than normal A4. I suppose we’ll just have to wait to see if HP ever issues this paper size. Then they’ll have an incentive to rewrite the drivers.

One small sop though - it has the ability to print a poster, using for example, four sheets of A4. This does at least mean that by confining a panoramic lanscape to the bottom half of a print preview, the result will come out on two pieces of paper complete with markings for the guillotine and an overlap for (physically) pasting them together. I have now made a "sort" of panorama.

The printer has but three push buttons on its facia, the On/Off, the Sheet Feed and the Cancel Print button. In addition there is a lamp to indicate an empty ink cartridge. Like the current fashion among “boy racers” for adding blue fluorescent lights to the undersides of their cars, the print head sweeps back and forth emitting a blue glow, which is even more temptation to open the lid and stall the bloody thing! Apparently, this is part of the Automatic Paper Sensing routine if you don't specify the quality of print medium in use. The blue LED is presumably used to measure the amount of light reflected from the paper

The manual is alarmingly slim, dealing mainly with installation and any troubleshooting resulting from it. Normal working and any problems, like how to clean the print head is left to a reference to either the CD-ROM or their web site where you can access a full manual. Tough luck if you’re not on the Web! The first thing I used the web for immediately after installing the printer, was to search for a newer driver. It’s always worth having these, and the installation CD-ROM has a “button” to push, which takes you straight to the HP Support Site, to establish whether anything newer exists. In my case it did, and 22 Mbytes of download later, I had the latest software – good job I’m on Broadband!

The printer driver has all the usual facilities you’d expect for a high-quality printer with Photo pretensions. There’s a daunting list of paper types, all suspiciously HP, although I’ve been using Ilford Photo Matte and Silk (going cheap in PC World at £4.99 for 25 sheets of A4), which seems ideal. Also, you can specify extra drying time to allow for “ink-rich” pictures to dry off without the risk of getting smudged – especially important if the print medium isn’t absorbent (O/H Slides for instance).

CONCLUSION

Obviously, even with the workload I’ve pushed through the machine in the last few days or so, this doesn’t represent a long-term report, but first impressions are VERY favourable.

For £100, it is a snip. It seems well built and well specified. Despite not having the word "Photo" in its name, it prints photos really well up to its maximum A4 size. It can’t do anything clever like print direct from your digital camera – it’s just a PC (or Mac) printer, but a damned good one at that!

Shame about having to buy the connecting lead as an extra.

Although it wouldn't be wise whilst the printer is new and therefore under warranty to mess around with "other people's inks and/or cartridges" even if you could-, it makes sense to find the cheapest supply of official HP inks. It'll be sometime around when hell freezes over that PC World becomes the best place to do so, and a bit of poking around on the WWW is recommended. I have now found several sites, each with their pros and cons (some have the cheapest black, some have bulk discount, some are post-free, and significantly, some even pay for the "empties" returnable by Freepost!). One thing they all have in common though is that they are markedly cheaper than PCW, but then you didn't need ME to tell YOU that!

AFTER THE EVENT, A SLIGHT SNAG REARS ITS HEAD

Having sung the praises of the ease of installation and the print quality, even on the non-Photo inks one little cloud appeared on the horizon. On trying to use my Roxio Easy CD Creator v5 to print CD labels, I find that the 5550 steadfastly refuses to print anything other than the outlines of the labels, ignoring any text or graphics completely. In case this was a known bug, I downloaded the latest set of fixes for the Roxio software – I had already gotten the newest drivers for the HP printer remember.

Anyway, this changed nothing, so I got straight onto the e-mail support service for HP Printers, spelled out my problem and within 30 minutes, I got an answer back, which I thought was impressive, even if the answer was only a “workaround” to the problem, rather than a fix. The answer was to install the drivers from my Windows XP for a more generic HP printer, in this case a 550c. So as long as I remember to choose the 550c when I’m printing CD labels, I’ll be OK. It’s a good job that I don’t want to print very high quality CD labels though, as the generic 550c drivers are, well, a bit basic really, with only a couple of print qualities to choose from.