Kyocera 2160 - page 131

These machines print at 10ppm in what HP calls “laser

quality” color,which would appear to be at 1,200dpi. HP

has come up with a technique involving large arrays of

color printheads built into a single chip that allows these

printers to print quickly with minimum movement from

side to side.

There are three models in this family:

lThe Officejet Pro K550 ($199) comes with a 250-sheet

input tray,a USB port, and optional duplexing.

lThe Officejet Pro K550dtn ($299) adds an extra 350-

sheet tray,standard duplexing, and Ethernet.

lThe Officejet Pro K550dtwn ($349) adds a Wi-Fi con-

nection.

All three models have a decent 300MHz processor and

are rated for a duty cycle of up to 7,500 pages per month.

32MB of memory is included. PCL is supported as well

as Mac OS X or Linux host-based printing.

The design is elegant and compact. The ink cartridges

are easy to pop in and out, a big improvement over many

earlier designs. The paper path is very simple, so paper

jams are no problem. Even better, this machine is very

quiet. Between its quiet operation and its compact size,

this is a nice machine that can reside comfortably on

someone’sdesk (not the case with most low-end color

laser printers).

There are two input trays, a 250-sheet tray and a 350-

sheet tray (standard on all but the base model). Output

maxes out at 150 sheets.

While this is a solid office printer, it also has a photo

mode for printing color photos. Photo printing is slower,

but not as painfully slow as with some other inkjets.

HP has developed high-capacity cartridges for these

models. That’s a big plus over most ink jet printers.The

high-capacity black cartridge will run for up to 2,350

pages, and the color cartridges can yield up to 1,200

pages. Better yet,HP indicates the price of a color page is

around 7.7¢ per page, far below those of similar laser

printers. The black cost per page is stated to be as low as

1.5¢.

Be aware that this is an ink jet printer.This means that

unlikealaser printer,it will slow down as the pages get

more complex and more ink gets laid down. But on nor-

mal office documents, the speed does very well against

comparable laser models.

What’s remarkable about this series is that it is only the

first version of this technology. We know HP plans to

build on it, both in terms of speed and features. The tech-

nology will doubtless disrupt the low-end color laser mar-

ket; whatwill be interesting to see is whether it can

reshape the larger workgroup market as well.

Pros: Everything, including price, design, running

costs, and features.

Cons: None really,unless you need PostScript.

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