I was in the market to buy a new printer 2 months after I bought my new computer. It came with a cheap Epson Stylus and it had very poor print quality. I was looking for something with in a reasonable price range that has good print quality. I believe I did a rather good job when I bought the HP Desk jet 840C.
I wanted a digital camera and needed a printer that would print my pictures with reasonable likeness to film developed pictures. I went to Office Max (Credit Card in hand) ready to purchase camera and printer at once. They happened to have a rebate deal going that made up my mind for me very quickly. The camera was $399.00 and the HP Desk jet printer was $189.00. They came with a combined rebate for $250.00. Look at it however you want but in my opinion I received the printer for free and got a discount on the camera to boot.
The printer is fairly fast but by all means not super quick like some of the newer models now. It prints between 3-8 pages a minute. The speed depends on if you are trying to print the best quality graphics or just plain black text.
The print quality is very good. If you are printing text it looks perfect you can not see any of the dots that are common with printed papers on low resolution printers. When printing graphical pages the quality is very good but not excellent. You can see the printer lines across the page in spots and the clarity is about 90%. The colors are vibrant so your pages do not look dull. If you are looking for a printer at a reasonable price for school reports, work projects, flyers, etc... this is a very good choice. (quality wise) If you want a printer for the sole purpose of printing digital pictures you may want to invest more money for a better version.
I say it is a multipurpose printer because there is not very much that you can't do with it. You can print in straight black & white, color, or greyscale. The paper size can vary from 3x3 to 8.5x14, all you have to do is slide bars in place to hold the paper when changing sizes it is very easy.
The setup of the printer was fairy easy. The software and the cables were easy to install. You have a choice of Parallel Printer Cable or USB Port Cable connection. The only thing that I was very unhappy with is that a cable connection does not come with the printer. It must be purchased separately. I could not find that anywhere on the box and was surprised when I got home.
I suppose the warranty is pretty standard. 1 year with an option to purchase additional time. The good thing is that you do get 90 days of free telephone technical support. This comes in handy if you get home and have trouble installing it. I do not see many technical difficulties occurring during the 90 day period beside install trouble though.
The ink cartridges are easy to find in stores, and they are no more expensive than the rest. (Personally I think they are all expensive.) I prefer the refill kits but do not really advise them do to warranty problems. If you use any ink in the printer except what HP sells you void your warranty.
Overall I think this HP is a good purchase and I would recommend it for the price.
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