HP DeskJet 640C
Price: AU$199
Distributor: Hewlett-Packard Australia
Ph: 03 9272 2895; Fax: 03 9898 7831
www.hp.com.au
The 610C was tested just one year ago and cost, at the time, $249. Its successor, the 640C, is priced under the magic AU$200 mark. Cosmetically the 640C is a prettier printer than the 610C. It's still quite large and robust, and given the size, we were surprised that the AC power adaptor is still an external -brick". Ignoring the new façade, the overall design harks to printers way back in the HP family tree. For example, all the HP inkjets feature an output tray that stacks on top of the input tray and, to prevent smearing as pages are printed, a set of -plastic fingers" hold the current output off the top of the previous sheet and then retract and gently drop the output on top. The 900 series and to some extent the 800 series have all seen modifications and streamlining of the original design but if you look at the 640C you can view the original concept in all its glory.
The lower input tray caters for up to 100 A4 sheets and can, according to the manual, feed card stock up to 200gsm. We were a bit concerned that it may be difficult to clear paper jams given that there is no rear access to the tight -U"-shaped paper path, and HP has seen fit to provide a removable cover at the rear for all 800 and 900 series printers. Controls are very simple with a power button, formfeed button and three status LEDs.
Setup is certainly assisted by the two quick-start sheets provided, one is double sided and includes instructions for the PC with Parallel connectivity on one side and USB on the other. The third sheet is for the Mac and its USB connection. The paper based manual is very slim with just 24 pages in English which superficially cover the operation of the printer. If you need more info, then try the on-line docs, which at 70-pages appear to go into much more detail.
Cartridge replacement is easy: simply open the cover and the print cartridges undock and move to the centre of the carriage to facilitate access. The two cartridge bays are clearly colour coded with the left bay occupied by a CMY tricolour cartridge and the left either black or a photo cartridge. As with all the HP printers, the printheads are an integral part of the ink cartridge and each time you replace a cartridge you are replacing the heads as well. The 640C's print resolution varies depending on the type of print task undertaken, straight black printing is rated at up to 600 x 600dpi but let any colour sneak into the equation and the resolution drops back to 600 x 300dpi.
The 640C cartridges are not the same as the 900 and 1200 series printers and as a consequence the life expectancy of the cartridges varied. The 640C managed to produce 400 black pages with 5 percent coverage (just over half the 900 series, for example). Colour cartridge life was very good, certainly superior to the 900 series standard tricolour cartridges but then the 640C's colour cartridge was the high-yield version and we would expect around half the 360 pages obtained with the standard cartridge. Cost per page is around 15 cents for black and 19 cents for colour.
While the 640C may be the slowest of the HP printers in our benchmarks, it did manage a 4ppm peak throughput; the fastest in the sub-$200 price bracket. The 640C does choke a little on our complex Word document dropping back to 0.48ppmâ€"the slowest of the sub-$200 group. We found the 640C's text quality to be superior to the BJC-2100SP with very clean character formation and much richer blacks on plain paper, but the Lexmark Z22 is easily a cut above the HP.
At 0.11ppm, our photo test showed that the 640C is no speed demon but, to put it into perspective, it was still slightly faster than the other sub-$200 printers. The quality of the output on the other hand was found lacking when compared to the sub-$200 Canon and Lexmark. The dither patterns tended to be more coarse and intrusive than the other two and as a consequence some of the finer detail was -blurred" or at times even lost. Colour fidelity was quite good although the Canon 2100SP was superior in this regard.
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