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When choosing a colour
printer for your office, it's wise to look beyond specifications.
Specs will only tell you so much, and they generally don't reveal
much, if anything, about ease of use—which is what ultimately
determines whether you'll enjoy consistently great results or
suffer big disruptions.
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Important things like intervention rates, control-panel design, and
network-management capabilities—items you won't find on any
datasheet—can have a big impact on whether or not your office
is successful with colour. The only way to uncover these differences
is to make a thorough comparison.
Intervention rates, for instance, are influenced by a variety of factors—ink-
or toner-cartridge capacity, the number of consumables, and the number
and lifespan of replaceable parts like imaging drums and inkjet print
heads. Interventions can be intensified by other factors, as well.
Consumables or replaceable parts that require a service technician
can affect uptime and availability, and the number of access points—the
fewer the better—can influence the ease with which paper jams
are cleared.
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Ease of use is just the tip of the iceberg, and HP offers the same
kinds of advantages in other important areas. We think you'll choose
HP colour printers for a number of reasons if you make a thorough comparison
by asking questions like:
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Does the device offer best print quality and performance
out of the box? |
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How sharp is colour and black text, do all four colours
(CMYK) tightly register, are fills uniform, and do the colours
on output match the colours on your monitor? |
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How does the device perform in the real world? Important
things like a fast firstpage-out time from powersave mode, the
speed at which the device processes complex files, and the frequency
and length of cleaning cycles can have a big impact on real-world
performance. |
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Does the vendor's network-management utility let
you route specific alerts to the appropriate people and multiple
destinations so you can, for instance, send supplies alerts
to the nearest administrative assistants and troubleshooting
alerts to the helpdesk? And does it let you batch configure
printers or drivers in one easy step or must you configure each
printer and each client's driver one at a time? |
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Is the device reliable? HP is the only printer maker
that has received an "A" rating or better for 12 consecutive
years in PC Magazine's Service and Reliability Survey. |
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