HP Color Inkjet Printer cp1160 Review

Can't Afford a Color Laser? Look No Further

Team spirit and company camaraderie are fine, but deep down, nobody likes sharing a printer. Whether for the confidentiality of critical data or just the convenience of not having to walk down the hall, a desktop printer can be a business boon -- if not for every single employee, at least for a workgroup of two or three -- and low-cost, monochrome lasers do the job admirably.

Unless your business needs printing in color. The either/or dilemma is obvious: Consumer-oriented ink-jet printers are wonderfully cheap (under $200) and capable these days, but relatively slow and often rated for only a couple of thousand pages per month. Color lasers are fast, professional powerhouses, but start at $1,000-plus (with the best models costing over twice that), and are fairly bulky to boot.

Ink-jet vendors have tried to split the difference before -- we tested the Lexmark J110 last April, but balked at its $899 price tag. Now Hewlett-Packard Co. has stepped up to the plate with a blue-gray toaster oven.

No, sorry, the Color Inkjet Printer cp1160 just looks like a toaster oven -- it's a 19.2-inch-wide, 17-inch-deep, 7.3-inch-high box (you can put papers, knickknacks, or even another printer, up to 40 pounds, on its flat top) with a projecting front paper tray that holds up to 150 sheets.

Its duty cycle is a solid 5,000 pages per month; its advertised top speed is a perky 17 pages per minute for black text and 16 ppm for color pages; and its peak resolution is a laser-beating 2,400 by 1,200 dpi. It comes with a duplexer for printing on both sides of a page, and HP's driver offers watermark, booklet, and thumbnail (up to 16 pages per sheet) printing. With both USB and parallel ports, it can be shared by two officemates -- three, if someone walks up with a notebook or PDA with an infrared port.

And it costs $399. (If you define an office printer as one with a network adapter, HP's model cp1160tn comes with an Ethernet print server and a 250-sheet second paper tray, giving 400-sheet capacity, for $599.) We think that's a good price, though we note that any ink-jet bears higher ink and paper costs than a laser, and there's one concern with the cp1160 in particular (discussed below).

More important, we think the HP really does fill the gap between cheap ink-jets and costly color lasers. It's easy to use, reasonably quiet and fast (though, like all ink-jets, not as fast as advertised), and its printouts (except for slapdash drafts) look great -- fine on cheap plain paper, and downright terrific on coated ink-jet stock or when printing images on glossy photo paper. As a step up from a consumer ink-jet, the cp1160 means business.

Skip To Page • 1 Can't Afford a Color Laser? Look No Further 2 Hey, Gimme Some Better Paper, Willya?

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