Pros: Good print quality on plain paper. Excellent photo output on premium papers. Photo REt II uses multilevel printing and resolution enhancement techniques to produce output that looks better than one might expect from this 300-dpi colour printer.
Cons: Some propensity to misfeed paper. Does not ship with Windows 98 or NT drivers (available for download separately). High cost per page (but somewhat better than most competing color inkjets). Minor problems with banding, text quality (particularly at the top and bottom of each printed page); Early drivers had problems with color fidelity. Does not use standard Windows 95/98 method of installing drivers.
We've owned quite a few Hewlett-Packard inkjets over the years. The oldest, an original DeskJet model from 1987, is still going strong, although various bits of rubber (notably, a rubber gasket that apparently protects the ink-cartridge from drying out) have begun to deteriorate. Other than that -- and its glacial speed, compared to today's models -- it is still a dependable workhorse, and prints as sharply today as it did over a decade ago.
Our second DeskJet, a mid-nineties-era model 660C, did not fare so well. HP, apparently on the "economy inkjet" bandwagon, produced this printer with a mechanism that, at least on our unit, became progressively sloppier as the years wore on. After printing only a few hundred pages, our 660C began to print pages that had crooked lines instead of straight ones. Color registration became impossible to correct, and the printer began to make unusual noises. Probably not coincidentally, this period saw HP lose its dominant position in the ink-jet printer market, as competitive models from Epson, Lexmark and other vendors delivered better print quality at amazingly low hardware prices. Indeed, one wonders if printer manufacturers now look at printers as a disposable item, or a loss leader to procure future paper and ink-cartridge sales.
So, here is HP, back with its 720 series of inkjet models, promising photorealistic output, via a technology it calls "PhotoRet II." We tested the printer with HP's "Multipurpose" paper, as well as Labelon's "Presentation" paper stock. In both cases, color fidelity and print quality were not great. There was plainly visible banding. Printing a test page from Adobe Acrobat Reader, we were also surprised that the printer driver did not allow us to print in the background (a function known as "spooling."). HP acknowledges some issues and workarounds with Acrobat (and 27 other programs including CorelDraw, Excel, PowerPoint, Publisher, Quicken, and WordPerfect to name a few) in a readme file.
More troubling was the fact that text at the bottom and top of each page we printed tended to have minor imperfections. Text had noticeable flaws, especially in the very first and last lines on the page. For some reason, though, the printer seemed to get better with age. After a hundred pages or so had been printed, the quality had improved to the point where we no longer had any complaints. We were, however, concerned with the colour accuracy of the printer. For example, take a look at this picture: www.tcp.ca/gsb/PC/WINNTspi.gif
The blue clouds in the above-listed image were -- no kidding -- bright orange when we printed them using the driver that shipped with the HP722C, and its default settings. Didn't anybody at HP notice such a serious problem? Colour fidelity issues, however, were addressed by a version 10.3 update that is now freely available for download from HP's website (www.deskjet-support.com/dj720/drivers.htm). It's also worth mentioning that the printer was not listed among the drivers on the Windows 2000 (Windows NT 5.0) beta 2 disc, nor does the NT 4 driver work under the beta.
The non-standard printer setup method employed by the DeskJet 722C may be confusing for novice users. When Windows' plug-and-play function finds the printer, it presents a dialog prompting you for a driver, as is common for most other printers. However, such a driver provided, and this dialog must be dismissed and a Setup program run -- requiring two restarts on our Windows 98 system! -- to complete the installation. In other words, under Windows 95 or 98, you cannot use the Add Printer control panel. Moreover, if you change a parallel port IRQ or related BIOS setting, it seems to forget that the driver has been installed and you must first uninstall the existing driver and then repeat the entire Setup process. Why can't HP simply provide a driver that works with the standard Windows plug-and-play installer?
Of the 100 pages of clean, flat paper we printed from our test unit, we had two serious misfeeds that jammed the unit. One jammed in such a way that none of the paper was visible in either the in- or out-tray areas, forcing us to open a back-cover hatch to retrieve the badly wrinkled sheet. We also noticed that when the Windows 98 driver was set to print in "reverse order" (which stacks the printed pages with page one on top), some of the pages printed incorrectly from QuarkXPress 4.0, with spurious page-breaks and missing text.
Print speed was nowhere near the claims made by HP. It took our 180 MHz Pentium test machine running Windows 98 a total of 4 minutes and 36 seconds to print eight web-pages of plain text in a Times Roman font. (For comparison, the Epson Stylus Color 740 completed the eight pages in 00:02:42. Both printers were set to output "Normal" print quality.) On HP's online 722C User Forum, one user of a 486-based computer with 24MB of RAM reported print times of up to 5.5 minutes per page for documents consisting of "less than half [a] page ... of mixed text and graphics (Normal mode)."
It's worth mentioning that the printed output of a second test, in which we printed identical pages of photographic images on glossy stock clinched our opinion that the HP has some very cool technology under the hood, in its PhotoREt II. This resolution enhancement process uses what appears to be an unsharp masking technique to increase the contrast at the edges of images, producing a result from the DeskJet 722C that was, to our eyes, considerably better defined, but also "grainier" than the photographic output of the Epson Stylus Color 740 we compared it to. (Compare the output for yourself. Both printers used premium glossy stock and the highest quality settings.) At any rate, we'd recommend carefully examining a printout from the machine you intend to buy before purchasing. And, as a footnote to our tests, it's worth mentioning that our DeskJet 722C died after a few months of use -- still in warranty, but a hassle nonetheless. Of course, maybe our 722C was a lemon. Or not.
Editors' Choice
Other Drivers
Post new comment