HP Officejet K7100 Inkjet Photo Printer
K7100 - A3+ colour photo printer from Hewlett Packard
HP has come up with a series of printers that are designed especially for small office business users who are looking for a versatile and affordable A3+ printer that is capable of producing a wide range of office materials like letters, photos, flyers and other marketing materials. Here we review a printer in that series, the HP Officejet K7100.
Simple design:
The Officejet K7100 inkjet printer has got a very modest design. It looks professional in its matte black finish with white linings. The center part alone of the printer has a glossy finish, quite attractive though. You will not find many controls in the facia of the printer. It just has three buttons for power, page resume and cancel options. It does not have a very large foot print either, it is moderate with its dimensions being just (w x d x h) 574.5 x 409.5 x 186.3 mm and weighing just 10.2 kg.
Installation of K7100:
The process of installation of K7100 Colour Inkjet Printer is quite simple and straight forward. But make sure you do not connect the printer to a Windows server system as the printer does not support it. And if you do indent to do so, load the printer’s drivers on to the server initially. Once the installation starts, the routine loads in the software bundle that includes HP’s web printing tools and its PhotoSmart Essential for manipulating photographs.
The extra tool box that is offered provides you with utilities that does a wide range of handy tasks like estimating the remaining ink levels and launching pop-up warnings if errors are detected. Once the print mileage feature is enabled, it allows you to track the general usage, and this sends the printing information to HP’s website for you to view.
Features:
With HP Officejet K7100 A3+ inkjet photo printer you will be able to produce very attractive materials up to A3+ with four inks or an optional six ink colour. There are options to print with or without borders in standard and custom sizes. This model uses the latest HP Vivera office ink which produces office quality photos. The speciality of this ink is that, it dries off real quickly and you can enjoy the best results when the printing is done on HP Everyday Paper that features colour lock technology. Using the standard four ink colour you can create high impact materials else you can also choose to have professional photo quality with the optional six ink colour. With the help of the poster printing option, the documents can be enlarged to up to 25 times their original size.
A slow coach:
Coming to the print speeds, though it is stated in the specifications that the K7100 Border less photo printer has the ability to achieve the top A4 speeds of about 25 ppm for mono and 20 ppm for colour, this rate can possibly be achieved only in draft mode. When put into testing, even with the settings set to the fast draft mode, the printer was able to achieve the print speed of only 17ppm. And as the quality of the prints is increased in the settings, the print speed reduces drastically. With the print quality set to average, the printer prints at only 8.5ppm and when you are aiming at the best quality, it gives you just 1.2ppm. K7100 makes the task of printing quite boring. For those who plan to do any colour printing, bring your iPod with you as the print speed is an awful 3ppm in normal mode.
Colour photographs take quite a long time too. An A4 sized colour photograph takes about four minutes, at the maximum setting. The photos come out in a resolution of 4,800 x 1,200dpi. If this is the case for A4 prints, then you will certainly need some patience for printing A3 photos. The print speed is about 1.4ppm in its normal mode and hence, if you are printing a full sized photo book at the highest quality as you would wish, the entire process takes about ten minutes.
Excellent print quality:
So far, the print speeds might have been disappointing news for you, but once you look at the output, you will get the feeling that it is worth the wait. The colour prints are of very good quality. Text looks great at the highest quality setting, but with anything less than that you will find some smudging. The colour balance in the photographs are quite good, they are sharp and the details are fine too. Banding, which is one of the major issues with most of the printers is invisible in the charts, photos and graphs printed using Hewlett Packard Officejet K7100 A3+ printer. This printer is very professional and it manages to pick even the minute details in the darker areas which the other printers of the same category fail to capture.
Cost effectiveness:
The only major issue with the A3 colour printers is that, they are quite expensive when compared with the A4 printers and this extra cost might be a bit of a burden for the small business investors. But this model, the Officejet K7100 seems to be just the perfect solution for this problem as it costs a mere £160.
Coming to the cost effectiveness of the printer, it works out that monochrome printing comes to around 2.7 pence per page and for colour printing it comes around 7.9 pence per page. Hence, monochrome printing is quite costly and colour printing is reasonable.
Warranty:
HP offers one year limited warranty for its Officejet K7100 A3+ colour inkjet printer.
Verdict:
The HP Officejet K7100 does a great job when the “Quality” factor is concerned. But its very low speed and high running costs, makes it an unlikely choice for printing jobs in small office and homes. Hence, if you are looking at quality large format colour prints, irrespective of the printing speed, K7100 is a good choice. This inkjet printer delivers excellent output considering its price tag.
Check 2009 Best selling Photo Printers, Reviews of Hewlett Packard Photo Printers in this website.
HP Officejet K7100 Colour Printer - Technical Specification Table
| Manufacturer | HP |
| Model Name | HP Officejet K7100 |
| Printer type | Inkjet printer |
| Print technology | HP Thermal Inkjet |
| Dimensions (w x d x h) | 574.5 x 409.5 x 186.3 mm |
| Weight | 10.2 kg |
| Colour | Black |
| Print speed | Depends on the type of document |
| Processor | ARM946E-S , 96 MHz |
| Print quality | Black: Up to 1200 x 1200 rendered dpi Colour: Up to 4800 optimised dpi colour and 1200 input dpi |
| Media sizes supported | A3+ (330 × 482 mm), A3 (297 x 420 mm) A4 (210 x 297 mm), B4 (250 x 353 mm), B5 (176 x 250 mm), C6 (114 x 162 mm), 76 x 127 to 330 x 482 mm |
| Compatible Operating Systems | Windows® 2000, Windows® XP, Windows Vista™ Ready; Mac OS 10.3.9, Mac OS 10.4.6 or higher |
| Minimum System Requirements | Windows® XP: Pentium® II processor, 128 MB RAM, 200 MB hard disk space for XP; Windows Vista™: 800 MHz, 512 MB RAM, 200 MB hard disk space |
| Memory | 32 MB |
| Printer languages | HP PCL 3 enhanced |
| Typefaces/fonts | 15 built-in fonts |
| Duty cycle | Up to 5000 Pages per month |
| Media types | Paper (banner, inkjet, photo, plain), envelopes, labels, cards (greeting, index), transparencies, iron-on transfers |
| Maximum print area | 290.8 x 403 mm |
| Print margins | A4: top: 1.7 mm, left: 3.2 mm, bottom: 1.7 mm Borderless printing: Yes (up to 330 x 482 mm) |
| Tray capacity | 150 sheets |
| Duplex printing | Automatic |
| Power requirements | Input 100 to 240 VAC, 1300mA 50/60 Hz, Output 32 VDC, 1500mA |
| Power supply | Built-in universal power supply |
| Power consumption | 60 watts maximum, 27.7 watts maximum (active/printing), 2.7 watts maximum (ready/sleep), 1 maximum watts(off) |
| Interface and connectivity | USB - compatible with USB 2.0 specifications, IEEE 1284-compliant parallel |
| Software included | HP Printer Software, HP Photosmart Essential Software, HP Smart Web Printing |
| Box content | HP Officejet K7100 Colour Printer, HP 339 Black Inkjet Print Cartridge, HP 344 Tri-colour Inkjet Print, starter CD with printer drivers, user documentation, power cable |
| Energy star | Yes |
| Warranty | Standard one-year limited hardware warranty |
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