We suspect that HP's designers were trying to go with the motif of a rolltop desk with the HP Deskjet 3550, but in the end the unit they've produced has more than a touch of a breadbin to it. We were somewhat tempted to see what it would in fact do with a chunk of thick grain bread, but demurred at the last second. The 3550 is a relatively small printer -- in some dimensions smaller than the Lexmark z605, although it is heavier, but still within the semi-portable, semi shiftable category.
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The 3550 is the only printer in our roundup not to use a simple drop-down printing mechanism where paper loads in from the top. Instead, the 3550 feeds paper back in a loop similar to that found in most photocopiers, so that paper feeds in from the bottom and spits out just above where it initially fed in. Aside from the photo paper, we didn't test the 3550 with very heavy stock paper, but it's a factor that could play against the 3550 if you needed to print on a lot of thick card stock, for example.
The 3550 managed very solid comparative performance in text and colour page printing in our tests, blitzing every other printer in text printing by a very nice margin indeed. It couldn't quite manage the same feat in colour page printing, coming in second to the Canon by around four seconds per page. There was a cost for this speedy performance, however, as the print mechanism used by the 3550 is markedly noisy -- just a tad moreso than the Epson Stylus C43UX, probably due to the 3550's smaller body being less able to absorb printing noise. In photo printing the HP 3550 also came second to the Canon i250 in speed terms, and while it managed to avoid falling into the extremely slow trap of the Lexmark and Epson units, photo quality was only average at best, and according to the HP's driver information, it appeared to eat up an alarming quantity of the unit's ink for each print.
Ink cartridges for the HP Deskjet 3550 come in at AU$34.45 for the black and AU$40.45 for the tricolour cartridges, with an expected yeild of 220 and 190 pages respectively. That equates to around 15.65c per black page and 21.2c per colour page. Those are reasonable prices for what is a budget printer, although both the Epson Stylus C43UX and Canon i250 are cheaper to run again.
Like most of the printers in our roundup, the HP Deskjet 3550's appeal also comes with a certain amount of compromise. If you're after a simple text printer with some colour capabilities, however, it's a solid option.
HP Deskjet 3550
Company: HP Australia
Price: AU$99
Distributor: Selected resellers
Phone: 13 23 47
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A Canon wins and the ads on the site are for Epson? Ya gotta love that.