HP Business Inkjet 3000 Review

Giant Economy Size

Got 80 bucks? You can buy a nice color inkjet printer for home use -- or just one of the eight printheads and ink cartridges of the HP Business Inkjet 3000.

Don't have enough desk space for the $80 inkjet? It'll probably fit in the paper tray of the HP: The Business Inkjet 3000 takes a whopping 23.5 by 25.5 inches of printer-stand or table space and towers 14 inches tall (it weighs nearly 70 pounds, so don't plan to tote it from room to room).

As you can tell, the 3000 is no ordinary inkjet -- it's an industrial-strength brute intended to be shared by an office workgroup, with a maximum duty cycle of a colossal 30,000 pages per month. More important, it's intended to rival the speed and quality of most color lasers, while undercutting both their purchase prices and per-page costs. Indeed, HP claims it offers the lowest cost of ownership of any HP color printer (1.9 cents for a black-and-white page, 7.9 cents for color).

That purchase price starts at $799 for the base Business Inkjet 3000 model, which comes with USB 2.0 and parallel ports and a 300-sheet, bottom-mounted paper tray (plus a single-sheet manual feed slot inconveniently located at the back). Unfortunately, that model can't fulfill the HP's destiny of network sharing; for that, you'll need the 3000n, which comes with HP's Jetdirect 615n Ethernet network server card for $1,099. For high-pressure office environments, the 3000dtn provides the network card, an automatic duplexing unit, and a 700-sheet additional bottom tray for $1,299.

That's a bit pricier than the Canon N1000 business inkjet we tested in September, which -- though we'll discuss details in a minute -- offers comparable speed and quality. But the HP is bigger (for that matter, it's bigger than HP's new Color LaserJet 2500; have we made it clear to you this thing is humongous?). And it's built for heavier duty -- up to four times as many pages per month.

And while many corporate printers have their own cooling fans, the 3000 has its own heater; it blows warm air to help dry newly printed but not-yet-ejected pages. Solidly colored prints on plain paper still felt a bit soggy, as with all inkjets we've tested, but HP says the system improves duplex printing and can dry transparencies five times faster. It certainly helps make the printer too noisy for right-next-to-PC-or-phone placement.

The Business Inkjet 3000 is also easier to use, with a handsome control panel with LCD menu -- not a plain but two-line, brightly backlit LCD menu -- braced by power; menu navigation (up, down, select, back); help (too-terse-to-be-useful menu explanations); and job cancel and resume buttons. The menus for setting defaults, printing assorted status pages, and maintenance functions are easier to navigate than most we've seen (whether on office printers or CRT monitors), though we grumbled that the up/down buttons don't cycle or scroll continuously; if you reach the bottom of a list, you must plod back upward.