HP DeskJet 3820 Review

A Humble Printer and Proud Of It

An armchair is built for hours of relaxation. A desk chair provides proper posture and support for work. Some chairs are dainty antiques meant mostly for decoration. An occasional chair is, well, something to sit on -- perhaps not the spot you'd choose for a whole day of watching TV, but not a stiff-backed, uncomfortable seat, either. And if there's such a thing as an occasional chair, why not an occasional printer?

C'mon, don't be snobbish. Lots of families and home offices want good-looking output, but not a lot of it -- some printouts of digital-camera pics, but not enough of them to justify a special-purpose photo printer; some business correspondence and PowerPoint handouts, but nothing near a heavyweight or even middleweight printer's 3,000- or 5,000-page monthly duty cycle. Not a cheap, disposable printer, but nothing pricey, either -- how about an even $100? Oh, and something compact to save desk space would be nice.

Ladies and gentlemen, we give you the HP DeskJet 3820. If all you read are the numbers on the box, this $100 inkjet seems a thrifty alternative to the $149 DeskJet 5550 we tested last month -- the same 1,200 by 1,200 dpi color printing, with a 4,800 by 1,200 dpi mode available for printing high-resolution images on photo paper.

Look again, however, and you'll see it's a definite step down -- the 3820 doesn't support optional cartridges for six-color photo printing, just the familiar pairing of one black and one tricolor ink cartridge. Nor does it have the 5550's automatic paper-type sensor -- you must click a software-driver dialog box to tell it whether you've loaded plain, coated inkjet, or photo stock (or transparencies, iron-on patches, or what have you).

Nor is it a threat to speed records, with rated maximums of 12 pages per minute for black and 10 ppm for color (before you apply the usual real-world divide-by-two rule). And with a duty cycle of 1,000 pages monthly, it's hardly a high-volume workhorse.

But the DeskJet 3820 is a nice printer. It's easy to use, quiet (the printheads are almost silent, though the paper feed clunks and thunks a bit), and produces sharp-looking output on either plain or coated paper. And when you're not printing, you can fold up its paper tray and pretend the 3820 is a jumbo toaster.

One Tray and Three Buttons

At 17.5 by 10.1 by 7.8 inches, the DeskJet 3820 isn't small, but it isn't a hulk like the spaceship-shaped 5550 -- and while the latter's AC cord terminates in a bulky brick, the 3820's power adapter is internal, so there's just a slim cord to plug into the wall. Both USB and parallel ports ride high on the rear panel, above a removable backplane that looks designed for one of HP's automatic duplexers (though officially the 3820 offers only manual double-sided printing, with the driver prompting you to flip and reload pages).

Up front, the same flip-down panel serves for both a 100-sheet input and 50-sheet output tray (with pages landing face up on a small catch flap). The horizontal feed is easy to use, resists skewing, and only jammed once in our tests -- plain paper proved too thin for the back-and-forth cranking the printer performs during initial setup. On the minus side, you find yourself scrabbling with your fingernails when you must remove a few remaining sheets to load a new stack.

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