At the entry-level end of the inkjet marketplace, there numerous number of printers available, but few at the monetary value of HP’s new Deskjet D1660. From Internet suppliers like Amazon, you can purchase one for well under £30, so what do you get for that kind of money?
Unsurprisingly , the design of the printer is pretty simple. It has average width for an A4 printer, but is considerably less deep than most. It uses HP’s trademark print path which takes paper from, in this case, a fold-down tray at the front and feeds it back out on top of the input stack. There is no output tray, but the technique is cheap and cheerful and works surprisingly well. As there’s no cover to the paper sheets, you’ll probably want to remove and store them when you’re not printing, which is a bit of a pain .
There’s no control panel on the machine and a single power button with an inset green LED shows when the machine is active. A single USB connection on the rear is the only way of getting data into the printer and a small, black block power supply provides low voltage power.
This printer uses two hp ink cartridges and they are numbered hp 300 colour and 300 black, there are high and low capacity versions available.
HP claims speeds of 20ppm for black print and 16ppm for colour, both in draft mode. We always test in normal mode, as we believe few people use draft on a regular basis and we measured a speed of 4.5 ppm on our five-page black text print .
The printer can take up to 18 seconds before starting to print the first page of a multipage job, so it’s not a great surprise that on a 20-page document, where initial processing is a smaller proportion of the whole, the print speed rises, in this case to 5.36 ppm .
Print quality was very good for an entry level printer, giving sharp text with little bleeding .
Photo prints in best mode on Hewlett Packard photo paper were very good especially at this price point. Colours were natural and plenty of detail was evident.
Using the XL version ink cartridges is the cheapest way to print as the standard capacity cartridges have very little ink capacity.
Verdict
This printer is good value for money . It’s very easy to use and in most ways just gets on with the job. Features are basic , but it’s reasonably quick for its class and produces high quality output. If money is tight, the Deskjet D1660 is a good place to spend it.