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HP Deskjet 6127 Hewlett-Packard has introduced an inkjet printer for the home and small office market. The Deskjet 6127 is a speedy, network-ready, duplexing inkjet printer that fills the niche between low-end inkjets and more costly laser printers. Looks The Deskjet 6127 is of 17.9 x 17.3 x 7.25 inches and weighs 14.8 pounds with the duplexor installed. It looks quite sturdy, but you will have to sacrifice a fair amount of desk space. On the front panel of the printer is the standard three button layout - power, paper feed and print cancel. An ink level indicator is also provided. The color scheme is beige and metallic silver and has a high level fit and finish that gives it a classy look that would fit into any work environment. Setup The HP Deskjet 6127 comes packed with features, the most impressive of which is the connectivity option. You have a choice of using USB or ethernet. Ethernet is a fairly common feature on laser printers, but this is the first time I saw an inkjet printer with this built in. Ethernet makes the printer ready to be put on your network at home or in a small office. The manual was a bit thin on Macintosh specific instructions and confusing on the networking aspect. It claimed you needed to purchase a printserver for networking. I just plugged it into my ethernet hub at home and was able to output files to the printer without a printserver. The printer comes with black and white and color ink cartridges, an installation poster, a power cord, a print driver install CD and the duplexor unit. However, neither USB or ethernet cables are included. Including a USB or ethernet cable with the printer would have been very inexpensive. This is a drawback that may trouble some. Paper Handling For an inkjet, this printer is speedy. It prints up to 20 pages per minute black and white text, and up to 13 color. As with most inkjets, a higher quality setting will affect the print speed. Photo quality printing speeds were acceptable with the highest quality prints taking less than a minute to output. The Deskjet 6127 also boasts a 150-sheet input paper tray, 50-sheet output tray and an optional 250-sheet second paper tray. Another standard feature is an automatic, two-sided print duplexor which makes double-sided printing a breeze. Along with impressive paper handling, the printer also has fairly large ink cartridges, 42-ml black, and 38-ml tri-color, which are about twice as large as the cartridges in my Lexmark inkjet. The cartridges however, are pretty finicky. It took four tries to get them installed properly and after printing a few documents they have to be reseated again. The cartridges do last a long time, meaning the nuisance of cartridge installation is minor at best. |
The Deskjet 6127 features an internal paper sensor. It can determine what kind of stock you are using, whether it is plain paper, matt, or photo paper and make the needed adjustments automatically. This makes it pretty fool-proof to get the best results and, best of all, the sensor makes the inside of the printer glow blue when the room lights are dim. Which is cool.
Software Control The print driver gives you a good deal of control over your print settings. You can specify the paper stock or let the automatic sensor do that for you. You have four quality settings to pick from: draft, fast normal, normal and best. You can adjust the saturation, brightness and color tone of your prints. It also has several settings to enhance digital photos: contrast enhancement, sharpness, smoothing - to remove grain from photos - and smart focus, which enhances the look of low resolution images. Finally, you can specify the duplexing option and how you want the pages to be oriented - from the top or the side. It's nice to see a feature-packed print driver in OS X after suffering with less than satisfactory efforts from other manufacturers. The Downside The only shortcoming of the printer is it's print quality. Hewlett-Packard specs the resolution of the printer at 600 dpi for text and 4800 x 1200 optimized dpi at its highest quality setting on photo paper. On glossy paper the quality of graphics and photos is excellent. For text documents, the main workhorse of the home and small office, the results are disappointing. The output on standard paper is fuzzy and fatigues the eyes after prolonged reading. This is a shame. With all of this machine's features, it seemed like Hewlett-Packard produced a must-have printer for the small office. The Bottom Line The HP Deskjet 6127 is a speedy printer with plenty of features that would suit the needs of the small office. Photo output is excellent but, its text quality may be a concern for those looking for laser-sharp output. Price: $249.00 > Hardware requirements: Mac OS 8.6 or above, Mac Os X, 10.1 and above.www.hp.com
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