HP DeskJet 5550 Inkjet Printer Review

The HP Deskjet printer series has been around for years and the HP Deskjet 5550 is the latest in a long line of HP Deskjet printers. As a result HP or Hewlett Packard as they used to be called, know this market very well and the HP Deskjet 5550 is the perfect printer if you need inkjet printing capabilities at home. The HP Deskjet 5550 is perfect for printing invitations to parties and impressive school projects.

The new HP Deskjet 5550 is easy to install and offers the home inkjet printer options to print photos in good color at 4,800 by 1,200 dots per inch resolution. All of these good qualities of the HP Deskjet 5550 combine with all that is good about HP Printers in terms of after sale support and more importantly basic build quality. The best thing about the HP Deskjet 5550 is that you can pick one up for a less than $50!

HP DeskJet 5550: Home Alone?

Inkjet printers are notoriously expensive to run and the HP DeskJet 5550 is no exception. A recent study by Oki revealed that a laser printer can save you up to 85% over an inkjet color printer in the cost of the printing. But color laser printers still cost a lot more than inkjet printers and the family printer is not really going to be doing that much printing in terms of pages per month. The HP Deskjet 5550 will never be considered a serious printer, but then the HP Deskjet 5550 doesn't have a serious price.

Here are the specifications:

• black: up to 17ppm
• color: up to 12ppm
• 8mb memory (not expandable)
• >Total Input Media Capacity 100 sheets
• 1200 dpi x 1200 dpi for monchrome documents
• 4800 dpi x 1200 dpi for color documents
• >Maximum Duty Cycle: 3,000 prints/month
• 6 color palette

HP DeskJet 5550: It's Not For Everyone

There are much better photo inkjet printers out there, you can get 14 pages per minute out of the HP Deskjet 5550, but it is far from the best resolution. The best resolution involves the addition of a 6-color photo cartridge and the 4x6's look good but this is a very expensive way to print your photos.

Our Conclusion for The HP Deskjet 5550

There are inkjet printers producing much better results with their ink jets than the HP Deskjet 5550, however, particularly in color reproduction. You will be hard pushed to find an inkjet printer cheaper than the HP Deskjet 5550 though.