HP Laserjet P1505 Review

Undercutting all of the small laser printers recently tested, the HP Laserjet P1505, with a price tag under £90 is aimed at the budget end of the laser market. Lacking an LCD screen, it makes do with buttons and coded lights and although it boasts a USB2.0 port, there is no Ethernet port for multi-user printing. If network printing is a high priority, HP does offer the P1505n model that incorporates an Ethernet port, but the price rises by an unreasonable £50.
Design
The P1505 doesn’t look much, especially compared to the attractive Samsung ML-1630 and it is obvious that HP has had to cut many corners to get down to this price point. Both the input and output trays are not of the usual HP standard, with the input guides being particularly small and difficult to move. The control panel, consisting of buttons and lights can be very confusing to interpret and the lack of any printed documentation to consult is frustrating. An on screen help system is employed but personally I would prefer referencing a hard copy.
Cartridges
The printer is supplied with a starter cartridge with a limited capacity of 1,000 pages, so it will not be long before you are forced to buy a replacement. The only cartridge suitable for this printer is the HP CB436a with a capacity of 2,000 pages and is not intended for heavy-duty use. This cartridge type is currently only used in this machine and two multifunction printers and costs a hefty £42. This yields a cost per page of over 2p, so it is not particularly economical. Compatible toner cartridges have not reached the market yet, so you cannot rely on this avenue for cost savings.
Performance
Unfortunately there was also evidence of cost cutting in the print tests. Plain text is handled fairly well given the likely workload, HP’s new spherical toner delivering crisp characters, however graphic performance isn’t up to par. Gradients were afflicted by plenty of banding and the maximum resolution of 600×600 dpi is half of that available from some other budget printers, like the Brother HL-5240. If print quality is disappointing, the same cannot be said for print speed. This printer hit 22ppm in tests that included both text and graphics, a result that is excellent for a budget laser printer and is faster than many more expensive printers.
If you are just after a fast affordable mono laser printer for your home office, at less than £90 the HP Laserjet P1505 may just fit the bill. But if you require a little more in the way of usable features or better quality output, you would be well advised to increase the budget slightly and look one division up, at the likes of the Brother HL-5240.

Canon Pixma iP2600

The Canon Pixma iP2600 is a budget, no frills inkjet photo printer. Retailing for under £30 and replacing the Pixma iP1800, this is an entry level, basic printer with few features. As such it lacks such items as a PictBridge port and a memory card slot, but is a sleek design and produces bold, crisp prints at competitive print speeds.

Design
Canon has put a lot of thought into the design of the Pixma iP2600, the small exterior, 5.6×17.4×10 inches, is very sleek and in glossy black with a slightly mirrored finish is a great addition to your desktop. No boring grey plastic shell for this neat printer. The only downside to this finish is the propensity for the shiny body to retain fingerprints and attract dust. However if kept clean blends in nicely with other modern desktop peripherals. A basic control panel is situated on top of the printer, with two buttons; one a paper feed button and the other a duel power and error-warning button. The back of the printer is home to the USB port and power input socket. As with all manufacturers, Canon does not include a USB cable with the printer, so this will be an additional expense. With no PictBridge or memory card slot you are forced to download images to your PC and print from there, but this is to be expected from a printer in this price range.

Cartridge supplies
Only two cartridges are required in the Pixma iP2600, a black ink cartridge and a three-colour cartridge. There are two capacities of each available, the standard black cartridge, PG37 has 11ml of ink and the higher capacity PG40 has 16ml. The standard colour cartridge, CL38 contains a total of 9ml of ink, 3ml of each cyan, magenta and yellow, whilst the higher capacity CL41 contains a total 12ml of ink, 4ml of each colour. With the PG40 costing less than £14 and the CL41 less than £17, these cartridges represent the best value for use in this printer.

Performance
In speed tests the Pixma iP2600 performed very well. It managed to produce 5.68 pages per minute of black text, which compares well with both the HP DeskJet D4260 and the Lexmark Z845, that are both more expensive printers. The canon also performed well in quality tests, the characters formed were precise with crisp edges and created no blurred areas, in colour graphics tests most documents came out with solid colours and nice even distribution of colour. The only slight area of concern was in portions where gradual colour gradients occurred but these imperfections were barely noticeable to the bare eye and only a perfectionist could grumble.
4×6 photos printed on Canons semi-gloss paper were also impressive. They were not perfect but were well balanced and even, a difficult job for a budget printer.

So with solid printing performance at relatively quick output speeds and acceptable photo prints, the Pixma iP2600 is an affordable choice and is a printer that performs well above its weight, making it probably the best budget buy under £50.

Inkjet page yields.

As more printer manufacturers shy away from giving details of how many ml’s of ink is contained in an  inkjet cartridge it has become more important to  understand page yields and how they are measured.

Page yield is the total number of pages that you can print with a given ink cartridge. Traditionally each printer manufacturer would run their own differing tests to determine page yields and customers ran the risk of comparing “apples to oranges” when determining the printer page yields from different manufacturers.

Now, fortunately  printer  manufacturers  work with the International Organisation for Standardisation (ISO) and have developed a set of industry standard tests to measure inkjet cartridge page yields.

What is ISO?

ISO is a network of the national standards institutes of 156 countries, on the basis of one member per country, with a Central Secretariat in Geneva, Switzerland, that coordinates the system.

ISO is a non-governmental organization: its members are not delegations of national governments, as they are in the United Nations. Rather, ISO occupies a special position between the public and private sectors. Some of its member institutes are part of the governmental structure of their countries, or are mandated by their governments, while others represent national partnerships of private-sector industry associations.

Therefore, ISO is able to act as a bridging organization in which consensus can be reached on solutions that meet both the requirements of business and the broader needs of society, such as the needs of stakeholder groups like consumers and users.

These tests consist of printing a standard set of five pages, continuously, until the ink cartridge has reached the end of its life. This continuous method of testing is obviously less time consuming and expensive for the manufacturers to perform and whilst may allow an “apples to apples” comparison, bears little resemblence to real life situations.

The five pages chosen for example are unlikely to be replicated in actual day to day print situations and industry experts estimate that ink printer users only print a few pages at a time and that hours, if not days can pass before an other print job is requisitioned. This type of start/stop printing can dramatically reduce the page yield obtained from a cartridge. Inkjet printers use some ink to keep the printhead nozzles clear to allow the ink to flow smoothly and most printers perform a maintenance operation on start up which also depletes the volume of ink in the cartridge.

Some page tests are measured on a page coverage of only 5% for black print, the standard letter test, and areas of solid black or areas of greyscale on the page will have an effect.

Canon are now alone amongst the major printer manufacturers to continue to display the volume of ink contained in their cartridges and it is unlikely they will continue to do so if their competitors have abandoned the practice. HP and Epson until recently had this information available, however on the latest HP packaging only a page yield figure is given and the latest Epson packaging contains no information at all to aid the consumer in a choice. Lexmark have had a tradition of vagueness when it comes to page yield information on packaging and they have reached new levels of ambiguity with their latest XL cartridges, stating “2x More pages” and in the small print telling you that the cartridge will last twice as long as another Lexmark model.

It is true that different printer models would yield differing page yields with the same volume of ink, but it is clear this latest trend sheds little more light on the thorny question of how long am ink cartridge should last.