After purchasing my new digital camera and printing photos on my old Canon Printer, I decided that I needed a really good photo printer. I haven’t bought a printer in years for my personal use and began shopping around. I will not say that the HP 5550 is the best on the market, but for the price I have been very happy with my choice.

The HP Deskjet 5550

For the price the HP 5550 seems to be the best buy around. I priced Epson, Canon and HP printers before making my choice and for the money this was the best buy.

With this printer you get 4800 x 1200 maximum dpi on photo paper, 17 ppm on black and white and up to 12 ppm color. You can also use up to 6 colors for printing your favorite photos. One of my favorite things about this printer is that you can print 4x6 borderless photos on the 4x6 photo paper that you can buy now. No more hassle with the full sheets, with this printer I can print one photo at a time on its on paper.

The HP 5550 is a great text printer, not only is it quick but the print is easy to read and looks much better than the text print off of my HP 940 at work. This is a very versatile printer that you will be happy with whether printing photos or text documents. It has great speed with text, but is quite a bit slower when printing photographs.

Pros of the HP 5550

1. 4800x1200 dpi maximum resolution
2. $150 dollar price
3. 3 color photo cartridge that takes the place of the black cartridge for printing photos.
4. 17 ppm black and white and 12 ppm color
5. 100 page input paper tray and 50 page output tray
6. Parallel and USB ports
7. Ease of use of HP Printers
8. 8 MB of memory in the buffer
9. Ability to duplex with purchase of duplex accessory
10. Printer is low profile and will easily fit under a shelf on your desk.
Cons of HP 5550

1. You have to buy the USB or parallel cable
2. Smaller ink cartridges that will probably have to be replaced more often.
3. Ink Cartridges are more expensive than other HP cartridges


My thoughts

I have had this printer a little over a month now and have been very pleased with everything that I have printed from it. The photo quality is so much better than my older Canon Printer that I am now happy that I bought my digital camera. The dimensions of this printer are 17.9 x 15.2 x 6.2 in which makes it fairly wide, but it is very low profile which makes it easily fit under the lowest shelf on my computer desk.

The setup of this printer as with most of the HP Printers is very easy and is covered with the large color poster that is included in the box with the printer. You also get a black and white and a tri-color ink cartridge with the printer. The driver is easy to load and will allow you access the 5550’s features such as duplex printing, print orientation and print quality. The printer will let you know on screen when the ink is low. This is a plus for me as I don’t have to worry about the ink until the printer informs me of the low ink.

The ink cartridges are smaller in the 5550 than in other HP printers and I am not yet sure if this will be a problem or not. I believe you will probably have to buy ink cartridges more often, even though HP says that this printer uses less ink therefore the smaller cartridges will have the same life as the larger cartridges on the older HP printers.

Final Thoughts

So far I am really enjoying my new printer. I have been most impressed with the photo print quality of this printer. It also seems to print black and white text very quickly compared to my printer at work. Like all other HP Printers this has the easy three button controls on the front; off/on, resume and print cancel. If you are looking for an inexpensive printer that you will give you great photo quality then I would suggest that you look very closely at the HP 5550. I highly recommend this printer!!

Thanks for reading!








Recommended: Yes

Amount Paid (US$): 150.00
Operating System: Windows