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HP DeskJet 5550 Review

Two Inkjets for the Price of One

August 28, 2002
By Eric Grevstad

Two Inkjets for the Price of One

Those of us who wear animal skins and live in caves remember being awestruck by the first laser printers, with their 300 dots per inch of black-and-white resolution for unbelievably sharp, razor-fine text and images compared to contemporary dot-matrix printers' 72 dpi. Now the cheap inkjet printer on your desk not only prints in color, but with clarity formerly reserved for photo-developing equipment. Last month, we tested Lexmark's Z65, capable of 4,800 by 1,200 dpi and priced at $199, and now Hewlett-Packard has reached that resolution for $149 with the DeskJet 5550.

The first thing to say about the DeskJet's 4,800 by 1,200 mode is that it's only available when printing high-resolution photos (source images of at least 1,200 dpi) on photo paper; for other jobs and paper types, the HP is a 1,200 by 1,200 dpi printer. The second thing is that it doesn't really matter -- just as today's PC graphics cards can display more colors than the human eye can see, today's inkjets' variable droplet sizes and resolution-enhancement schemes make the numbers race rather meaningless once past the four-figure resolution mark.

For that matter, we've learned to ignore inkjets' advertised speeds, too -- the DeskJet 5550 is rated at up to 17 pages per minute for black text and 12 ppm for color printing, but (like every inkjet we've ever seen) falls short of claimed speed even for draft mode, let alone for high-quality output.

The important thing to say about the 5550 is that it's a relatively fast and sharp printer for both plain text and business- or school-report graphics, as well as a good stand-in for a special-purpose photo printer -- though it lacks the latter's digital-camera memory-card slots, it can produce borderless 4 by 6-inch prints, and switch from the usual four- to a six-color mode when outfitted with an optional photo ink cartridge. Its drawbacks are that it hogs desk space and guzzles ink cartridges; your consumables budget will run out before its 3,000-page duty cycle each month.

Swoopy Sci-Fi Style

The 5550 looks like a Klingon warship, or maybe a big silver crab holding a paper tray in its claws; like the Z65, it seems decidedly bulky (18 by 17.4 by 6.2 inches) compared to many desktop inkjets. On/off, job-cancel, and resume (after a paper jam or outage) buttons flank an ink-cartridge-maintenance warning light on the right flank. Both USB and parallel ports (no cables included) are at the rear, next to the socket for the AC power adapter, whose brick-sized plug end can monopolize an outlet or power strip.

The printer has a 100-sheet input and 50-sheet output tray. Its horizontal loading (you lift the output tray and slide paper into the narrow input-tray slot) and sharp-U-turn paper path are less convenient than the vertical-loading Lexmark's, but seem less prone to skewing or crooked feeding. A snap-in duplexer or automatic two-sided printing feeder is an $80 option.

While you can click the usual pull-down menu in the DeskJet driver to specify plain, coated, or photo paper (with emphasis on HP's own rather than generic offerings), the 5550 can also automatically detect the paper type, taking an extra three or four seconds at the start of each print job to do so. This media sensing is a big convenience, though we preferred the Z65's on-screen confirmation ("Paper type detected: Inkjet paper") to the HP's (merely "Paper type: Automatic").

Setup was the smoothest and easiest we've experienced with our Windows XP desktop, thanks to an "insert me first" CD that guides you through everything from connecting printer cables and inserting the ink cartridges to installing a "printer assistant" utility that combines a detailed user's guide with project and troubleshooting suggestions and links to HP's shopping site for ink refills.

(By contrast, when we tried plugging the 5550 into our Windows 2000 PC, we ran into an appalling endless loop of the Found New Hardware wizard starting, stopping with an "An error occurred during installation -- Access is denied" message, then starting again. Even after we scoured the CD for and manually installed the driver, the wizard popped up once at each startup. HP's online support site lists a similar complaint about the 970cse, so Win 2000 users may want to be wary.)