HP Deskjet D1660 Review |

There are a number of printers at the entry-level end of the inkjet market, but few at the price point of HP’s new Deskjet D1660. You can pick one up for well under £30 from internet providers like Amazon, so what do you get for that kind of money?

Few printer manufacturers give a thought to how difficult it is to photograph a printer clad entirely in glossy black plastic that reflects everything in its immediate vicinity, showing every fingerprint and particle of dust. The Deskjet D1660 does both, but we accept that neither will cause problems for the average customer.

As you would expect, the printer’s design is fairly simple. It has an average width for an A4 printer, but is considerably less deep than most. It uses HP’s proprietary print path, which in this case takes paper from a fold-down tray at the front and feeds it back out at the top of the input stack. There’s no output tray as such, but the tech is cheap and cheery and works surprisingly well. Since the sheets of paper don’t have a cover, you’ll probably want to remove them and store them when you’re not printing, which is a bit fiddly.

There is no control panel on the machine and a single power button with an inset green LED indicates when the machine is active. A single USB port on the back is the only way to get data into the printer, and a small, black block power supply provides low-voltage power.

Pull down a small cover at the front and the two ink and head cartridges move to the center of the carriage for replacement. There’s a black and a tri-color cartridge that snap into place in a jiffy. The software is basic but sufficient, and includes the HP Solution Center and drivers for Windows and OS X. Given its simplicity, installation takes a while.

HP claims speeds of 20 pages per minute for black and white printing and 16 pages per minute for color, both in draft mode. We always test in Normal mode, as we believe few people use draft on a regular basis, and we measured a speed of 4.41 pages per minute on our five-page black text print.

It can take up to 18 seconds for the printer to start printing the first page of a multi-page job, so it’s not surprising that with a 20-page document, where initial processing accounts for a smaller percentage of the whole, print speed increases, in this case to 5.36 ppm.

Our black-color graphics test, another five-page document, returned a speed of 2.56 pages per minute. Neither of these speeds are spectacular, but subjectively the machine is reasonably snappy and for the occasional print they’re aimed at – the quoted monthly duty cycle is just 750 pages – long wait times are unlikely.

The print quality of the machine is very good. Black text is remarkably clean for an entry-level inkjet printer, with little ink bleeding into the paper, resulting in crisp and legible text down to small point sizes.

Color graphics are good too, with solid fill colors, light tones, and good registration of black text over colored backgrounds. Finally, photo prints on HP Advanced Photo Paper vary depending on the print mode selected. Some noticeable banding and jitter patterns are visible in large solid areas in Normal mode.

In the best mode, which takes a little longer – 1:19 for a 15 x 10cm print – these disappear and the reproduction is closer to what you would expect from an HP inkjet printer. It must be said that this device is not primarily intended for photo printing, but in the “Best” mode the colors are natural and there is a lot of detail in both brightly lit and shadowed areas of the image.

The Deskjet D1660 uses the HP 300 and 300XL cartridges, which are freely available at great discount prices. The standard cartridges are fairly small in capacity, but this reflects the type of intermittent use that many customers will have from the machine. The XL cartridges have a higher capacity and are intended for those who print more regularly.

Using the XL versions gives a page cost of 4.30p for ISO black pages and 10.25p for ISO color pages, both including 0.7p for paper. While this cost may seem high, it actually holds up pretty well with inkjet printers that cost 2 to 4 times as much. We’d expect printing costs to be higher from cheap machines than more expensive ones, but there really isn’t much of a downside here.

verdict

This is a pretty good printer for the money. It is very easy to use and in most cases just gets on with the job. The setup is basic, but it’s quite fast for its class and delivers quality results. Printing costs are high but will likely go down and will always be slightly higher when the asking price is low. If money is tight, the Deskjet D1660 is a great way to spend it.

points in detail

• print speed 8

• functions 5

• value 10

• print quality 9

To press