At the entry-level end of the inkjet market, there numerous number of printers available, but not many at the cost of HP’s new Deskjet D1660. From Internet suppliers like Amazon, you can purchase one for well under £30, so what do you get for that kind of money?
As you might expect , the design of the printer is pretty unsophisticated. It has average width for an A4 printer, but is considerably less deep than most. It uses HP’s trademark print path which takes paper from, in this case, a fold-down tray at the front and feeds it back out on top of the input stack. There is no output tray, but the technique is basic and works surprisingly well. As there’s no cover to the paper sheets, you’ll probably want to remove and store them when you’re not printing, which is a bit of a pain .
This machine does not have a lcd display or control panel of any kind, just a single button for turning the printer on and off .
This printer takes two hp ink cartridges and they are numbered hp 300 colour and 300 black, there are high and low capacity versions available.
HP claims speeds of 20ppm for black print and 16ppm for colour, both in draft mode. We always test in normal mode, as we believe few people use draft on a regular basis and we measured a speed of 4.41 ppm on our five-page black text print .
When printing, the machine took about 20 seconds to get going, so our 20 page document worked out at about 5.5 pages per minute .
Print quality was very good for an entry level printer, giving sharp text with little bleeding .
Photo prints in best mode on good quality photo paper were very good especially at this price point. Colours were natural and plenty of detail was evident.
Using the XL version ink cartridges is the cheapest way to print as the standard capacity cartridges have very little ink capacity.
Verdict
This is a pretty good printer for the money . It’s very easy to use and in most ways just gets on with the job. Facilities are basic , but it’s reasonably quick for its class and produces high quality output. If money is tight, the Deskjet D1660 is a good place to spend it.