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HP Officejet J4680

Thursday, October 9th, 2008

The OfficeJet J4680′s star attractions are its integrated 802.11b/g wireless and fax connectivity, and its 50-sheet automatic document feeder (ADF)–rare features on such a low-priced machine. Those features make up somewhat for the minimalist 100-sheet input tray, which doubles as a 20-sheet output tray–yes, printed pages drop right on top of any blank paper you have loaded. I dislike this design: there’s too much going on in one place.Duplexing (two-sided printing) is not available. The similarly priced Dell V305W lacks an ADF or faxing, but it has separate input and output trays, and supports manual duplexing.

The control panel of the OfficeJet J4680 consists of a one-line monochrome LCD and a second line of simple arrows that point to function labels beneath the display. You use the two navigation buttons to choose a major function and to drill through the menus. This system is easy to use–except that longer messages scroll across the display like ticker tape, making them hard to read.

the OfficeJet J4680 delivered good-quality output at adequate speeds. It printed plain-text pages at a rate of 7 pages per minute and graphics pages at 2.1 ppm or worse. On plain paper, text looked dark, crisp, and precise; color images looked natural though somewhat grainy. On HP’s own photo paper, color images improved, acquiring a smooth and natural appearance. Scans and copies looked okay, but scans came out very slowly.

The OfficeJet J4680′s ink costs are reasonably good–and far better than those of the Dell V305W. The machine ships with a standard 200-page black cartridge and a 360-page tricolor cyan, magenta, and yellow cartridge. Both cartridges yield consumables costs of around 7 cents per page. A high-yield (700-page) black cartridge costs $28 (approximately 4 cents per page).

The OfficeJet J4680 might be too slow to show well in our rankings, but it’s still a nice machine. A small office that doesn’t do much printing would probably be happy to have the OfficeJet J4680′s feature set in such a compact, low-cost package. H

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Tags: HP Laser, HP Laser Printer, HP Officejet J4680, HP Printer
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HP Photosmart 8250

Thursday, October 9th, 2008

The cost of ink is cheaper than some other printers’ inks, its extremely fast, good quality sometimes,I like the quality that it prints some of the time, but I wish that it would print perfectly all the time. I am extremely pleased with the speed though. As for the money, I think it is a good printer to get, especially if you can find it on sale. Overall, I would recommend this printer to beginner and amateur photographers or anyone else who likes to take pictures.How does PC World rate a photo printer “very good” when it says in the review it prints bad pictures!!! hmmmm

HP claims that the permanent print head’s high number of nozzles increases print speeds, and the 8250 did turn out photos very quickly. The PC World Test Center clocked the 8250 printing a 5-by-7-inch glossy photo in just 29 seconds–the fastest we’ve seen from an inkjet printer. By comparison, the previous-generation HP Photosmart 8150 took 140 seconds to print the same photo. However, the second-fastest model (for photos) that we tested this month wasn’t far behind: The Canon Pixma iP5200R printed the picture in 36 seconds.

On plain paper, the 8250′s performance was less impressive, but still competitive. Text pages emerged at 5.7 pages per minute and color pages at 2.5 ppm; these rates are slightly faster than the Photosmart 8150′s, but they lag those of the Pixma iP5200R.

The 8250 comes with all the features you’d hope to find in a photo printer. In the center of its well-organized control panel is a 2.5-inch color LCD that flips up for previewing photos, performing simple edits, and operating the menus. A clear plastic cover to the right protects four media card slots, which accept most common formats. You can print straight from a media card without a PC, or quickly transfer the images to your PC via the printer’s USB 2.0 connection. The front USB port lets you print directly from PictBridge-compatible cameras. You can also plug in a USB flash drive and print any images it contains, though you can’t transfer them to your PC. For $60, you can buy a Bluetooth option that lets you print wirelessly from a handheld device such as a Bluetooth-equipped camera phone. Also, the included HP Image Zone software suite offers many features for organizing and sharing photos, designing album pages, and the like.

In addition to the printer’s main paper tray, which holds up to 100 sheets of plain paper, a second tray can hold up to 20 sheets of 4-by-6-inch photo paper. For an extra $80, a duplexer attachment enables double-sided printing.

Unfortunately, the 8250 printed the least attractive photos of any recently tested photo printer. On glossy paper, color images showed smooth gradations in highlights and mid-tones, but were oversaturated and too dark to reveal detail in shadows. Our grayscale image acquired a murky blue cast, with a foggy effect obscuring the details. Text did not print in a strong black, but looked more slate gray and blotted into the paper, resulting in fuzzy edges. Line art also came out too light, with lines alternating between thick and thin on each pass of the head. Graphics looked grainy, and colors appeared dull and washed out.

For prints such as we make in our lab tests, HP recommends using its new Advanced Photo Paper, which has a thin glossy coating that makes it resemble traditional photo paper. From the smaller tray, 4-by-6-inch Advanced paper fed smoothly, and we didn’t see any banding on the trailing edge of the print, an artifact that shows up often on borderless snapshots. However, the prints still looked dark and gloomy. In tests outside the lab, we got much better results on HP Premium Plus Photo Paper, which is slightly thicker.

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Tags: HP Laser, HP Laser Printer, HP Photosmart, HP Photosmart 8250, HP Printer
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HP Deskjet 450wbt Review

Thursday, October 9th, 2008

Portable printers cost more than their desk-bound counterparts, but if you have to print while you travel, you won’t find a better printer than HP’s $349 Deskjet 450wbt. The 450wbt runs on battery or AC power, and it weighs less than 5 pounds with its ink cartridges installed and its lithium ion battery attached. When closed, it’s easy to carry, measuring 13 inches wide, 7 inches deep, and 3 inches thick. Its paper tray folds down and snaps shut to close the printer securely when it’s not in use; the tray holds 45 sheets. The 450wbt doesn’t have an output tray–finished print jobs simply slide out onto your desk, your car seat, or even a picnic table. The model we tested includes Bluetooth, but if you don’t need that capability, you can buy the base model with USB 2.0, parallel, and infrared ports for $100 less.

In PC World’s testing, the Deskjet 450wbt operated a little slower than most recently tested desktop inkjets. It printed text at 3.8 pages per minute, whereas general-purpose inkjets averaged 4.9 ppm. Text looked slightly grayish in spots, but letters were well formed and clean–on a par with most of the desktop inkjets we tested. (When we printed on higher-quality inkjet paper, the 450wbt printed heavy black text that bled a little.) It generated documents of mixed text and graphics at 0.8 ppm, compared with the average of 1.2 ppm. When we installed the optional $25 photo ink cartridge, the 450wbt turned out great glossy photos in both gray-scale and color. Color glossies looked somewhat oversaturated but had superb detail, while gray-scale photos looked equally sharp and showed realistic textures. Even the color documents we printed using lower-quality plain paper and the standard ink cartridges looked attractive, with realistic color and sharp focus, though there was some banding. The 450wbt fared poorly on line art, however: Narrow parallel lines bled together, and diagonal lines looked particularly jagged.

In our tests to gauge consumables costs, the 450wbt’s ink costs matched those of the other mobile printer we tested, the Canon i80: 5.1 cents per black page (versus 5.3 cents for the i80), and 13.6 cents per page of color plus black (versus 13.4 cents for the i80).

One inconvenience to keep in mind: The 450wbt holds only two ink cartridges at a time, so to switch between printing documents and printing photos you have to swap cartridges and run the manual alignment procedure. A little plastic case that keeps the removed ink cartridge from leaking or drying out costs $15.

Also, PC World didn’t test the life of the lithium ion battery, but HP’s specs say that it should last 350 pages and take only 90 minutes to recharge. An extra battery will cost you $79.

Up shot: The 450wbt makes printing high-quality graphics on the go extremely convenient.

Popularity: unranked [?]

Tags: HP Deskjet 450wbt
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HP Pavilion a1510n Review

Thursday, October 9th, 2008

Ultra-budget-conscious buyers can certainly find a cheaper PC; a bare-bones HP a1400 series system, for example, starts at under $300. But anyone who wants to run an e-mail client, Web browser, and several other programs simultaneously or who wants to work occasionally with photo or other large data files will appreciate the extra processing power that the system’s Athlon 64 3800+ CPU and 1GB of DDR2 RAM deliver–especially if an upgrade to Windows Vista is in their future.

The a1510n earned a performance score of 97 on PC World’s WorldBench 5 test suite, a mark that ranks it a few percentage points below other systems running on the same CPU.

Due in part (we imagine) to its integrated GeForce graphics, which relies on both dedicated graphics RAM and system RAM, the a1510n posted an abysmal frame rate of 20 frames per second on our Return to Castle Wolfenstein test at 1280 by 1024 resolution; that’s one of the lowest marks we’ve seen in recent times. Game play at chez Wolfenstein was choppy at best, and images displayed on the HP vx17e screen were far too dark for comfortable viewing. Nevertheless, other images and small (6.8-point) text appeared clear and readable.

HP has left the door open to faster graphics by providing an open X16 PCI Express slot on the motherboard. Adding a decent graphics card could be your ticket to a meaningful performance boost. Beneath the easy-off cover, a relatively uncluttered interior presents no obstacles to the open RAM and PCI slots, so you could easily add a TV tuner, which this bare-bones Media Center PC lacks. A single-screw clamping bracket secures all of the expansion cards, but you may have to wrestle with a wad of unkempt wires and cables to reach the open drive bays.

Other pluses for this budget system are a LightScribe DVD burner that introduces text and images on the “top” side of recordable CD and DVD media–at a price of around a $1 a disc–and a keyboard that offers lots of big, easy-to-reach control buttons.

As usual, HP’s documentation includes a well-illustrated setup poster and excellent setup guides, making this system a great choice for a cost-conscious novice who wants a little more processing power than the typical entry-level PC offers.

Popularity: unranked [?]

Tags: HP, HP Pavilion, HP Pavilion a1510n
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Dell Inspiron 530 Value Desktop PC

Thursday, September 25th, 2008

The Dell Inspiron 530 was powerful enough to earn superior scores (for a value PC) in both its productivity and graphics performance tests, yet it’s quite inexpensive at $689 (as of 2/7/08).
Our test syste

m was based on a 1.8-GHz Intel Pentium dual-core E2160 processor and had two sticks of 1GB PC2-5300 DDR2 SDRAM, for a total of 2GB of memory. It came with a 19-inch Dell SE198WFP wide-screen LCD (1440

by 900 native resolution), as well. Most value systems use integrated graphics that rely on main system memory, but the 530′s graphics duties are handled by a 128MB nVidia GeForce 8300GS graphics card. The 250GB

estern Digital Caviar hard drive provides an average amount of storage space for PCs in this price range, and our test unit had a DVD/CD combo writer, too.
As for performance, the 530 earned a WorldBench 6 Beta 2 score of 73–commendable in the value desktop category, and slightly better than the 71 earned by the Compaq Presario SR5350F, which uses the same Intel Pentium dual-core E2160 CPU. The Inspiron 530 provided the best performance in the 3DS Max DirectX component of the WorldBench suite of all the value systems recently tested. Not surprisingly, therefore, it also earned the top scor

es among value systems for its graphics performance, making it the best choice for playing simple games. Because it

s graphics card has only a modest 128MB of memory, however, it still isn’t powerful enough for intensive gaming titles, such as Doom 3 and Far Cry. In our Doom 3 tests, the system earned only a subpar s

core

of 20 frames per second running at 1024 by 768 resolution with antialising turned on.

The 530′s attractive,

glossy white-and-silver midtower case is well ventilated, and its sliding front panel covers an external bay m

dule containing a media card reader and connectivity ports. Inside the 530′s case, you’ll find that good old-f

ashioned screws secure the components, so you’ll need a screwdriver when installing expansion cards and op

tical drives. Like most other value systems, the 530 uses a smaller motherboard that supports fewer

expansion options than larger (and pricier) boards. Available expansion options include one 5.25-inch external and one 3.5-inch internal drive bay, two PCI and one PCIe x1 card slots (the PCIe x16 slot is fill

d by the discrete graphics card), and two (out of four) DIMM memory sockets. The 530 lacks FireWire ports, but they can be added as an extra-cost ($30) option.
The Dell monitor delivered sharp text and fine color quality in both still and moving images. The USB-based optical mouse and enhanced keyboard that Dell bundles with this system are comparatively better (in performance and feature

s) than the standard-issue input devices that come with most value systems. Among the keyboard’s extra

s are several quick-launch keys, a retro-style volume knob, and two upstream USB ports. The 530′s online-only d

ocumentation is exemplary, with thorough, well-written instructions that are (thankfully) specific to the actual model, unlike the more generic documentation that some vendors often include.
If you want a value desktop with an excellent price-to-performance ratio and some room to grow, Dell’s Inspiron 530 is arguably the best deal among the budget PCs we’ve tested recently.

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Tags: Dell Inspiron, Desktop PC
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Acer Veriton VM460-UD2180C Value Desktop PC

Thursday, September 25th, 2008

Pros

Cons

Basic system boasts more expansion room than most value PCs, but isn’t as fully loaded as competing models that cost less.

Richard Jantz

If you’re looking for a basic desktop computer with lots of expandability options, the $748 (as of 2/7/08) Acer Veriton VM460-UD2180C has more growth potential than most budget desktops.

This PC houses a generous total of eight drive bays, versus the five or fewer bays many competing systems offer. The bad news is that, before upgrades, the Veriton VM460 is somewhat underpowered compared with other value systems in this lineup. With memory only 1GB and its Hitachi hard drive only 160GB, the VM460 is up against systems that offer twice as much RAM and storage space yet cost even less (such as the $620 eMachines T5246 and the $680 Compaq Presario SR5350F). The system also includes a DVD combo writer, but no memory card reader.

You do get an elegant Acer p223W 22-inch LCD (1680 by 1050 native resolution), with both DVI and VGA inputs. Although the VM460 we tested lacked a digital video output, the LCD displayed sharp text and fine color-quality images using a VGA connection.

The VM460 is powered by a 2-GHz Intel Pentium Dual-Core E2180 processor with two 512MB PC2-5300 DDR2 modules mounted on an Acer EG31M motherboard with integrated Intel GMA 3100 graphics.

In its WorldBench 6 Beta 2 productivity tests, the VM460′s score of 66, though very good for a value system, is about 10 percent lower than the average of the other budget desktops we tested in this roundup. Its performance in the Adobe Photoshop CS2 and Nero image burning components of the test suite were the lowest in our sub-$750 value PC group. Not surprisingly, the VM460 also tested poorly in its graphics performance, but so did all the other systems that rely on underpowered integrated graphics for our gaming tests. The Intel graphics chip it uses also lacks antialiasing support for rendering smoother edges in graphics frames, which means that–along with the Compaq SR5350F and the Sys Slimline Si200–it couldn’t complete some of the Doom 3 and Far Cry tests we conduct.

The VM460 has lots of connectivity ports, including parallel and serial ports for older peripherals, but no FireWire ports. The black-and-silver case is easy to open, and you have plenty of room to work with inside the well-organized interior. Quick-release mechanisms for its optical drive and expansion cards make it painless to add new components. For upgrading, you have six empty bays, comprised of three external (5.25-inch) and three internal (3.5-inch) drive bays, and four expansion card slots (one PCIe one x16, one PCIe x1, and two PCI).

The standard-issue keyboard works fine but lacks shortcut keys, and the archaic ball mouse is not as easy to use as the optical variety. The quick-start documentation that Acer provides for the system and the LCD is useful, but more detailed information on upgrading the VM460 would be a welcome addition to the overall package.

If upgradability is what you want in a value system, the Veriton VM460′s well-engineered case design provides room for more drive bays than any of the other PCs we tested. But the steep price for this relatively unpopulated system makes it difficult to recommend if you want a PC that’s really ready to roll as soon as you open the box.

–Richard Jantz