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HP Office Jet Pro k550 Inkjet Printer

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PCQ Bureau
New Update
Price: Rs 80,000 (2 yrs warranty)
Key Specs:752 MB RAM, 80GB HDD, multi format DVD writer 
Contact: ASUSTek Computers, Mumbai. Tel: 022-40058894. Email id:

info_india@asus.com.tw 



RQS# E26 or SMS 130326 to 9811800601
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The HP Office Jet Pro k550 is yet another inkjet printer

that has been pitched against the entry-level laser printers. The claim  is

on account of the low cost per page, much like HP's Business Inkjet 1000 model

we reviewed earlier. We received the base model for review.  The

installation is easy. It has a USB 2.0 port and 32 MB memory.  The printer

performed pretty well in speed tests. It managed printing a draft quality text

document in less than 3.5 secs. When testing for text quality, we could easily

read a point 2 regular text in Times New Roman. It managed to print a full-page

gray scale graphics image in 16 secs in Best Quality mode, with no apparent

banding. But in normal mode, we did notice a faint banding. Moving to color, the

printer took just under 30 secs to print a full-page color photograph on 173

g/m2 photo paper. It fared far better than the Business Inkjet 1000, which took

101 seconds. The image quality was also very good. This can be attributed to the

software as well, which provides various options for managing image quality

print out. To test the cost effectiveness, we emptied the entire black cartridge

by printing multiple copies of a document in grayscale only. Our document had

sufficient text, a small graphic and a table. For us, 1240 pages exhausted 40 ml

of ink. Thus, a 58.5 ml cartridge would print around 1800 pages. The cartridge

costs Rs 1,500, bringing the price per page to under Re 1, better than the

Business Inkjet 1000,  that recorded Rs 1.50. Note that the color

cartridges cost Rs 1,000 a piece. These are the results for a normal quality

print. So the cost would drop down for draft-mode printing. While the results might vary from those by HP itself as we used a

different document, the scores are excellent for an inkjet.

Bottom Line: Real value for money product that would cater

to the needs of all organizations. Even more attractive is the price tag of each

color cartridge.

Anadi Misra

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