A Great printer that you should avoid!
Written: Aug 31 '03
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Product Rating:
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Pros: Excellent quality, speedy printing, low cost
Cons: Flaw in design that causes the printer to die in a short time
The Bottom Line: This printer has a lot of potential, but in the end it is faulty and home users should look at an alternative printer not in the 33xx series.
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| adamadi's Full Review: Hewlett Packard DeskJet 3320 |
Introduction
Hewlett Packard (HP) has been a longstanding leader in the printing market alongside Canon, Epson and Lexmark. This printer, the HP Deskjet 3320 is one of HP’s newest attempts at capturing the low end printer market. This printer sells for for less than $50. I purchased mine for $45 at Pricesmart.
Printer Design
The Deskjet 3320 has a fairly sleek design. The printer is very small, not much more longer than eleven inches in width. It uses the typical HP paper path design, the paper tray sits at the bottom and finished prints are deposited on top. While this design is great for economising on space, it does mean that you can’t print on boards easily as the paper has to be completely flipped to be printed. Another problem is the paper tray. It realistically can hold 50 sheets of paper because it is very small. The printer uses a standard USB port for connection with the computer.
What’s in the box
Included with the printer is an adapter, colour cartridge, instruction sheet and a driver CD. Notably missing is the black cartridge and a USB cable.
Cartridges
As mentioned above, a black cartridge is not included. The printer has two cartridge slots although can print with only the colour cartridge installed. However, this is not economical as the printer uses more ink to print black with the colour cartridge. The colour cartridge, as are all standard inkjets, includes three chambers of ink; Cyan, Magenta and Yellow. It mixes the three colours to make all others.
The cartridges themselves are very small, holding around 10 millilitres. This is where HP makes its money. If you do any fair amount of printing, you will run through cartridges quickly. However, there’s some good news. The cartridges are not as expensive as others (around $20 per cartridge). If you’re comfortable refilling your cartridges, this is where the second good news lies. This cartridge is really easy to refill. You only need to peel back the label on top and use a syringe.
Installation
The printer is relatively easy to install. The drivers included are for Windows 98 through to XP. Linux drivers are available online from HP’s linux printing website. For installation on windows, its as simple as inserting the CD and following the wizard. At a point in the installation, you will be asked to plug in the printer (with a cable you must purchase separately!). If you follow the instructions, you should not have any problems. I had flawless installation on Windows 98, 2000 and XP. Installed with the drivers is a monitoring and configuration utility, which estimates ink levels and allows you to adjust printing defaults in an easy interface.
Performance
For the price, the HP Deskjet 3320 performs remarkably well, if it works (see next section). Quality from this printer is extremely crisp, rivalling many Epson printers. I don’t usually refer to DPI figures because most users (especially those considering this printer) have no idea what they mean and you can always get the specs on HP’s site. In layman’s terms, you will see very few dots in an image unless you peer very closely, even on normal 20 pound paper (copy paper). Using higher quality matte or glossy finishes, there will hardly be any grain to an image. All the colours are very vibrant and rival the tones of professional prints. The printer is not lacking in the speed department either, printing is consistently fast, from print queuing to actual printing.
Fundamental Flaw
Now, so far so good. You may be wondering why on earth I gave this printer one out of five stars. Well, it has to do with a serious flaw in the printers design. Inside the printer, there’s a belt which is clipped on to a motor which carries the print cartridges horizontally to reach all ends of a page. The actual clip that holds this belt to the motor is extremely fragile. In most cases, after only a small amount of printing, this clip will break. It can either come flying out the printer (which you may read in some reviews as a piece of metal flying out) or it can get lodged inside the printer (which in turn can touch a capacitor on the logic board and kill your printer).
The reason for this is because the clip is too weak. The sad thing is HP refuses to admit the flaw in the printer. I know this because I work at a company which services printer. We have had no less than fifty of these printers reach our office for the same problem. It can be solved by reinforcing the clip, but it can only be done by someone who knows what they’re doing (and there are many people out their who claim they know but are clueless). When this clip breaks, the printer is useless, it can no longer print because the belt is dysfunctional.
HP provides a three month warranty with this printer. If the clip breaks within the timeframe, you can get it replaced. However, you will get back a printer with the same flaw. When the warranty runs out, you’re out of luck.
What about the 3420?
The HP Deskjet 3420 is another printer HP makes. It is the same printer as the 3320 except for a few differences; it includes the black cartridge in the box, the print speed is marginally faster and the cover is black not beige. Other than that, it is the same printer and suffers the same flaw as the 3320. (Also note the 3425 is a 3420 just with some sample art paper).
Conclusion
This printer had so much potential at being an ideal home solution, however the fundamental flaw undermines all its positives. Unless you can buy it from somewhere who actually reinforces the clip before hand (some smaller technically oriented stores may do this), avoid at all costs.
Recommended:
No
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adamadi
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Reviews written: 56
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