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Printers - Epson 4300 versus HP Photosmart
Posted by: barrmar on Apr 12, 2010
Doing some e-shopping recently with my Discovery miles, I decided to buy another printer.
It isn't that I don't already have a printer. I have an Epson Stylus 4300 that I purchased for just over R300 about two years ago.
I also have a Samsung monochrome laser printer that still works - except for the paper feeder. Each sheet now has to be fed in manually. This is a most economical printer. I spent R350 to fill the toner cartridge about a year ago and have printed thousands of sheets.
The Epson printer is a three in one - scan, copy, print. Photos print beautifully on HP premium paper. The scanner works well and you have full control of the resolution and format of the scanned image. The only problem with the printer is with the cost of the ink cartridges. There are four - black and the three colours. The cartridges are tiny. They run out incredibly quickly and are very expensive. At over R200 each a full set will set me back by about R850. On that I can probably print about 100 sheets. Less if I print photographs.
There is one problem with the Epson. If any one of the colours run out, you cannot print a monochrome document. The colours run out annoyingly quickly.
"Get an HP," instructed my son. Cashless, I had a look at the Discovery shop. The HP Photosmart looked like the best buy at about R850. Ordered over the long weekend, the printer arrived on Thursday.
The HP looks good and is more compact than the Epson. It also has only two cartridges - monochrome and colour. The original HP cartidges are available at R175 each - perhaps less if I shop around. Getting the Epson cartridges was often a huge effort. Most ink stockist do not stock them. The HP cartridges are more easily available.
Next came the installation. A dvd is supplied with the printer and that went into my laptop under Windows 7. Two hours later, it was still trying to install without making any progress. I had to start again, this time with a little more success. The Vista installation on my PC was rather more successful and was completed within a few minutes.
Installing the ink cartridges was a simple process and unlike the Epson, it doesn't use half of the ink on the first installation. So far so good.
The quality of the general printing looks ok - much the same as on any inkjet printer. Next, I printed some photographs using HP premium paper. The results were less than exciting. Certainly not as good as on the low cost Epson printer.
The HP is certainly easy to use and has a snazzy touch screen to perform various functions. I had to scan some documents - it was easy and quick and the results were fine.
Reorganising the books and documents around the house this afternoon, a whole lot of old photographs appeared. I decided to scan these to the my PC. The quality was shocking. Perfectly good pictures scanned to my computer with the most shocking colours. Every photo looked seriously underexposed. I tried changing the settings - maximised the resolution to 600 dpi, changed the format to BMP - all to no avail.
The HP is proving to be a disappointment. Is it faulty or am I doing something wrong? Can I swap it for another within 7 days?
It is interesting to note that the more expensive machine (based on purchase price alone) does not perform as well as the cheap one. Now I will have to get in touch with HP very quickly to find out what to do.
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