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Printer Cartridges – HP LaserJet 1320: monochrome printer

Toner Cartridges — Sat, 30 Jan 2010 02:03:12 +0000

The HP LaserJet 1320, a compact home and office monochrome printer may not be the cheapest small-office laser available, but it delivers on the essentials and then some. It prints sharp, clean black letters and good graphics that suit professional manuscripts. This HP Laser jet include feature such as a built-in duplexer, a high maximum resolution for grayscale graphics, and the option to buy a model with wired or wireless networking preinstalled. This machine has a 14-by-14-by-10-inch (WDH) footprint and weighs 25 pounds.

The cheap HP LaserJet 1320 includes both a contemporary USB 2.0 port and an old-fashioned parallel port. The HP LaserJet 1320 merits applause for including a feature that’s rare in such a small machine: its built-in duplexer lets you print on both sides of a page without making you flip over the sheets one by one. Given that the advent of e-mail and the Internet have ironically created more paper waste, duplexers are a cost-effective, environmentally friendly must-have for any office. The HP LaserJet 1320 includes 16MB of RAM, which you can expand to 144MB. The Laser Jet 1320 has two control languages HP PCL 5e and HP PCL 6 for basic printing tasks and PostScript Level 2 emulation for users who create or work with more complex desktop-publishing and graphics documents.

Text became faint and spidery at 2.5- and 3-point font sizes, yet the letters didn’t glob together. The text looked excellent at normal, readable sizes. At the default setting of 600x600dpi, grayscale-graphics test document produced impressively smooth, evenly stepped shading from dark to light.

Printer Cartridges – Canon Pixma MP980: multifunctional printer

Toner Cartridges — Sat, 30 Jan 2010 01:56:54 +0000

The Canon Pixma MP980 is a capable all-in-one device that prints, faxes, and copies documents in full color 4,800×9, 600-pixel resolution. The additional features of MP980 include 3.5-inch LCD screen, an easy-to-use control panel, and a media card reader.

The Canon Pixma MP980 measures 7.9 inches high by 18.5 inches wide by 15.2 inches deep. The all-in-one weighs a hefty 24 pounds because of the auto-duplexer built into the back for double-sided prints. Canon MP980 uses six individual Chroma Life 100 ink cartridges including one dedicated gray cartridge for better quality monochrome photos. All of the dye-based color inks cost $12.99 to replace, and the pigment-based black tanks run a bit more at $14.90. Canon estimates a black-and-white document to cost 3 cents, a full-color document costs 5 cents, and it costs 29 cents per 4-inch-by-6-inch color photo; these prices are average for today’s typical photo printer. The scanner of the printer also supports document sizes up to 8.5 inches by 11 inches, but the fixed hinge makes it difficult to stretch the scanner cover over thicker documents and books.

The cheap Canon Pixma MP980 offers a collection of features that make life much easier for the home photo enthusiast. This printer can be connected to the computer through a standard USB cord and to the network with the Ethernet port on the back, or even go wireless with the built-in 802.11b/g wireless print server.

The text print speed of cheap Canon Pixma MP980 is fairly good. It prints about 5.75 pages per minute. Compared with the rest of the competition, though, the MP980 fared about average.