Product Reviews

The latest in a splurge of new inkjets to pour on to the market this winter is HP's cp1700, a very stylish-looking A3 printer. It's aimed primarily at office users, but is good enough for very basic design proofing, and photographers will love it. The cp1700 also continues the trend for ever-smaller footprints for A3 inkjets, occupying a width of no more than 673mm, while boosting ink cartridge life and throwing in a handy duplex option.

A look at the machine's core specification reveals little we haven't seen already in HP's recent inkjet launches, such as the 1200dpi x 2400dpi printhead. In other words, if you've seen the kind of quality output achieved from one of HP's better deskjet 900 or PhotoSmart models, you'll know what to expect. This is anything but a criticism, as the cp1700 produces some great results from all kinds of documents on to all types of paper stock. So while HP maintains its reputation for building great printers for office documents, this product is equally strong in photographic output.

Resisting the trend for six-colour photo inks, HP continues to put its faith in layered four-colour inks. However, unlike its A4 models that work with black and a tricolour ink cartridge, the cp1700 uses four separate cartridges.

Consuming passions

The cost-effectiveness of this approach is debatable in small printers - there's less wastage but the individual cartridges cost a lot. However, it seems to work well in the cp1700. While a full set of new cartridges will set you back around £100, they're a good size and last longer than you'd expect. HP claims the £27.58 black cartridge lasts for 1400 A4 sheets and the £24.14 cyan, magenta and yellow cartridges for 1750 sheets (based on 5% per colour coverage). Even allowing for manufacturer optimism, this puts the average per-sheet cost at less than 10p, which is around half that achieved by comparable devices, such as Epson's Stylus Photo 2000P.

The four ink cartridges are slotted into fixed sockets under a lid which sits on the top right of the printer. This lid opens further to reveal a protective flap towards the back that covers the printheads.

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These are easily put in place, but we recommend you keep the installation poster handy because you need to reclose the protective flap in a very particular manner otherwise the printer will insist it's still open.

Status messages appear in an LCD window at the front. When not warning you of problems, or indicating that printing is in progress, the window shows the four ink levels. This is a nice touch, as HP printers don't show ink status in their drivers, only in a separate maintenance utility program. Our only complaint about the LCD status window is that it's too dark to read in a subtly lit office.

Feeding time

Sheets are fed through the cp1700 in the time-honoured HP fashion, with both input and output trays at the front. This forces sheets through a harsh u-bend, but we encountered no feed problems during testing.

You can feed extra-thick stock in single sheets from the rear, bearing in mind that the duplex unit will need to be swapped out first. In practice, this isn't nearly as fussy as it sounds: in our opinion, removing and replacing the duplexer is quicker and easier than reloading paper in the input tray, which sits inaccessibly under the output tray.

Duplex printing is slow but, especially in an office environment, a wonderful thing in a colour inkjet. Once you start printing two-sided sheets, you'll never want to go back and will never regret the extra £100 or so it costs over the non-duplexing model.

Having made a snide comment about refilling the input tray, it does feature a clever extending action. In the same way that output trays can be extended for full A3 sheets or left contracted for A4, so too can the input tray underneath. This keeps the footprint from being unnecessarily large when you're not printing in A3.

Sense or sensibility

Anyone familiar with HP inkjets will recognise a couple of other special features. The cp1700 provides a built-in IrDA infrared receptor, so you can print wirelessly from PowerBooks, palmtop computers and certain digital cameras.

Also included is HP's unique optical sensor just above one edge of the output tray. This sensor can determine the nature of the paper you're printing on and adjust your print settings accordingly. This is possibly the best feature ever devised for non-proofing inkjets. It also comes into play when running a printhead alignment test, detecting errors and correcting the alignment without any user input required.

In use, the cp1700 is realistically fast but not exactly a speed demon, and appreciably quiet even if not as quiet as many other HP inkjets. Given the high quality of the output and the host of valuable features, the cp1700 seems almost foolishly cheap to buy.