- Average user rating: 2.0 stars out of 7 reviews Back to product review
- My rating: 0 stars
Full user review
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2 out of 2 people found this review helpful
4.5 stars
"Great Printer Great Deal!!!"
Pros: Price & Quality - Long Term Reliability - Superb Text Quality
Cons: HP Software - So just Install the Basic Driver and you'll be good to go!
Summary: When my HP Deskjet 722c finally gave up the ghost (the guide ribbon started to deteriorate) after about 10 years of trouble free service... I found myself in the market for a new inkjet printer. The very low end inkjets are somewhat misleading. HP has a D1360 or something for$50 that gets only 150 pages on a black ink cartridge. Granted I don't print a ton, but I don't want to be paying for and changing ink that often. This printer should get 400 pages on a black ink cartridge... and the ink is like $20. I went to the store set to buy the D4160, and then I saw the D5160 was only $10 more. I liked the paper feed better and it has slots for memory cards and it can print cd's/dvd's and a separate feed for photos and envelopes... and the same ink as the D4160.
My criteria were as follows:
- must have excellent black text print quality (this printer can do 1200x1200dpi. The Canon Pixma4200 only did 600x600dpi and it's a bulky machine w/ up to 5 inks... and if one of those colors goes 'low' it will refuse to print in black until you replace the color cartridge. No such problem w/ the HP.
- Respectable color quality. The 5160 is more than respectable in this category. I don't print tons of photos at home. I don't even want to because it's so not cost effective. I'd much rather pick and choose and send them to Snapfish for .20c / picture. Add up the cose of inks and paper and it just doesn't make sense to me to be printing photos at home. So although the D5160 is 'Photosmart' I personally don't put a big priority on this feature.
- Durability. I got 10 years out of my old 722C. It was a workhorse and I very seldom had to replace ink cartridges. The black ink capacity was 42ml! The lady at HP said tho that the printers that use vivera inks are much more efficient in their use of ink, so we'll see how it goes... so far so good!
One word of advice... the 'salesrep' / kid at Staples said the printer only came w/ a 'starter ink cartridge' and there were signs on each printer to this effect as well. He claimed that it had only 15% of it's capacity filled. My printer shows the ink at full capicity, so I felt that was pretty misleading. I only bought an extra black ink, but I probably could have put this off until I was empty - which probably will not be for quite some time.
The only advice / word of caution I would give is this. A few years back I bought an HP all in one. The software was so rediculously large and sooooooooo bad that I gave the printer away. I specifically wanted a printer to do just that... print. As such, I did not install all the 'photosmart etc.' software that HP would like me to. I love HP as printer manufacturers, but definitely not as a software company. I did a basic driver install from their website and after a few tries, it worked out perfectly.
Good luck and enjoy!
Where to buy
HP PhotoSmart D5160:
$200.00
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Amazon.com Marketplace
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$200.00 | Yes |
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