HP DeskJet 3820 Review

Output Worth Waiting For

Front-panel controls consist of three buttons -- the on/off switch, one to resume a job after reloading paper or clearing a jam, and one to cancel a job in progress. Lifting the lid lets you load the two ink cartridges: A replacement for the supplied HP 78 tricolor cartridge costs $35 and is rated for 450 pages -- or $55 and rated for 970 pages, if you buy the double-sized model, while the HP 15 black cartridge costs $30 and is rated for 495 pages. The black cartridge that comes with the printer, however, is a 14ml starter job rated for only 310 pages -- shades of the half-full toner cartridges supplied with $199 lasers.

Relatively puny, pricey ink cartridges are a fact of consumer-inkjet-printer life, especially when vendors opt for combined instead of separate cartridges that can be wasteful if a print job sucks up more of one color than another. Still, we don't mind the cost so much in a printer destined to produce just a few hundred pages a month, like this one, and installing cartridges is a snap.

So (mostly) is hardware setup, with the exact same cheer and jeer we gave the DeskJet 5550 just the other week: HP's software steps even computerphobes through the installation routine on Windows XP systems, but stumbled and glitched on our Windows 2000 desktop, with a looping "Found New Hardware" wizard and incomplete installation that forced us to reboot and load the driver manually. Win 2000 users, beware.

Once installed, the software offers a friendly combined user's manual and setup/maintenance/suggestion guide, as well as a few basic driver options (accessed through applications' Printer Properties dialogs) -- not only a choice of media type and draft, normal, or best-quality output, but image adjustments for photos; two- and four-per-page handout; and four-, nine-, and 16-sheet poster printing.

The proof, as always, is on the page. Here, the HP proved unsuited for the impatient -- using best mode with coated inkjet paper, a one-page business letter with small color logo printed in 2 minutes and 26 seconds, while a six-page Adobe Acrobat document took 23 and a half minutes. But the quality of text and graphics, especially considering the 3820's target market, was first-class.

At least for text jobs, the combination of draft mode and plain (copier) paper was a pleasant surprise -- text was more of a dark gray than black, but still darker and sharper than most inkjet drafts. A 20-page Word document printed in four and a half minutes (the first two spent spooling up); five pages in 74 seconds. Normal mode on plain paper was only slightly crisper, but best mode was acceptably close to laser quality, although five pages took just under three minutes.

Draft-mode graphics were poor, with plenty of banding, on plain paper. Normal mode (4 minutes and 3 seconds for our six-page Acrobat mix of text and charts) was bearable, but it took best-quality mode (11 minutes 11 seconds) to really get rid of banding and jiggly text with plain paper.

Treated to coated inkjet paper, the DeskJet was impressively sharp in normal mode -- our five-page Word document took 2 minutes 50 seconds, the six-page PDF 9 minutes 19 seconds. Best mode was both too dark and too slow for our liking -- the five pages of text took nearly 14 minutes.

Our 7.5 by 10-inch photo (a 2-megapixel digital camera image) was a blur on plain paper and only fair in normal mode on coated stock (3 minutes 6 seconds), but reasonably crisp in best mode on coated paper (5 minutes 33 seconds). Best mode on glossy photo paper looked great at arm's length, but neither its close-up quality nor its speed (7 minutes 25 seconds) will threaten six-color photo printers or even higher-end four-color models.

As we said, however, the DeskJet 8230 isn't meant to be the ultimate inkjet; it's a $100-price, 1,000-a-month-duty-cycle occasional printer. And in that niche, we like its chances; we like its style; we like its combination of not-half-bad draft mode and normal/best modes that favor sharpness over speed. If your printing needs aren't that heavy, why pay more?

Pros:

• Decent drafts and good if leisurely everyday output
• Fold-up paper tray saves space if you don't use the printer daily

Cons:

• Definitely for light-duty home rather than busy office printing; disappointing photo prints
• Great software for Windows XP, glitches with Win 2000