Customer Reviews

HP Officejet Pro K550DTN Printer. Single Function Printer. Up To 37PPM Black & 3

5 star:		(6)
4 star:		(3)
3 star:		(1)
2 star:		(2)
1 star:		(1)

 

 

A good buddy of mine recommended this style of printer to me years ago. He is in the ink business and calls any printer that uses multi color cartridges or even the tiny single color cartridges "joke printers".

Why? Because the joke is on those who buy them, every time you run out of ink. If you actually like to do a lot of printing they will drive you to the poorhouse while HP/Epson/Lexmark laughs all the way to the bank. Once you use a printer like this, you will feel the same way.

I have had the HP 2000c and the 2200 prior to this. They used similar high capacity cartridges and separate print heads. I loved them. The amount of money this type of printer will save a serious business person is hundreds of dollars a year! No fooling.

This is the latest version of that style of printer from HP. This thing does it all - auto duplexing - networking - and a second tray that holds 350 sheets of paper!

Some reviewers are complaining that this goes through ink too fast. They are failing to take into consideration that the cartridges that come with the printer are way smaller than the high capacity cartridges you can buy as replacements. The ones that come with this printer are "starter" cartidges, not the high capacity ones.

I had this thing running in about 15 mintes after opening the box. Plug it into your network hub, then run the CD on each computer that will use it. It went smooth as could be, including my laptop that wirelessly accesses the network.

Duplexing works great. Color is spectacular using the right type of paper. Both trays are feeding just fine. And the speed is amazing. For business people - time is money. So not only do you save money on ink - you save it in time.

Ink I can always buy more of. Time is irreplaceable!

It is a business printer, folks. For business people. And it gets right down to business, just like it should. It is rock solid and adds money to your bottom line.

It's not a photo printer, but certainly does a respectable job of photo printing.

At the price these are selling for they are a steal. My HP 2000c cost me over $500 and I never regretted it. It had no duplexing, no networking and no second paper tray. In the first year of use (it lasted years) it saved me WAY more than the total purchase cost in ink alone.

I have used and recommended this type of printer to my clients for years and every one has thanked me for getting them away from joke printers.

So if you want to print pictures to send to grandma - look elsewhere. If you want to do business - this is the ticket.

I use this printer in my office as a personal printer (non-networked), and bought it for two reasons - the speed and the ability to duplex (double-side) print.

For speed, it lives up to its advertisement. I haven't tried to print photographs on it yet, but I am satisfied with the quality and speed.

For duplexing, I have had some issues with paper jams. They are easy to clear, but it can be frustrating.

Also, when paper spits out onto the receiving tray, sometimes the paper doesn't completely eject, which causes the next page to feed under that one (pages out of order in a long document! argh!). Or worse, the next page forces the edges together so you end up with either wrinkled papers or a pile of papers on the floor.

Finally, my other huge negative is loading paper - I find it very difficult to load paper in either tray (the standard tray and the 350-page supplemental tray). The ends of the trays need to lift to open, and there is a barrier directly above it (for tray 1 it is the receiving tray, and for tray 2 it is tray 1). I find it awkward to pull the trays out. In addition, there doesn't appear to be a solid paper stop, so I always wonder if the paper will be picked up properly by the feeder or not.

The only negative thing I can say about this printer is that it is BIG. Everything else is fantastic.

I have not had any of the paper jam problems the reviewers below suffer from. The printer is quite fast, the wired connection makes sharing the printer with multiple PCs a piece of cake, and the built-in duplexer is fabulous. I have printed six manuals so far, each roughly 400 pages long. While the printer uses fairly little ink on the 'normal' setting, I bumped the ink volume down a notch in the printer's control panel. I also bumped the drying time down a couple of notches, which increases the speed of the duplexer.

Using HP's ColorLok paper, you can get great prints that are water-resistant. I have verified this already, thanks to my 3-year-old daughter. :-)

I love this printer. It's fast, quiet, uses separate ink tanks for each color, uses separate (and replaceable) print heads, can hold 600 sheets of paper, includes a duplexer, and comes ready to plug in to a home or office network. I couldn't ask for anything better for my needs.

I was trying to find a better printer than our old inkjets (812 and 842C) with duplexing and cost-effective printing. I seriously looked at a couple of laser printers (HP 2605dn and 3600dn) but I spoke with the person who refills our inkjet cartridges and he recommended this one instead (I thought he might be just trying to keep the business, but it is what he said it is). The print heads and ink cartridges are separate, so they can be replaced individually. It is less expensive, has a lower cost per page, and is actually way faster than the others I looked at.

It was very easy to set up, it is very fast, and the duplexer works great. Worth every penny. It is a little larger than I thought, and it has some pretty serious side motion because of the print heads sliding back and forth, so it needs to be on a firm surface (I have a high printer stand that moves a little). Most people probably wouldn't even notice. The duplexer sticks out the back so it needs about 4 or 5 inches or so extra behind it. A little noisy when printing, but typical for inkjets.

I like it!

Update 10/05/09. Well, I used to like it. It just quit working all of a sudden. I don't think they make it anymore which is a good thing. I paid about two hundred for it and it only worked for a year and a half. Looked around and finally settled on an Officejet Pro 8500 wireless which so far is working fine. We'll see what happens.

We purcahsed two of these for work. Both have problems with the supplmental trays. About 6 times out of 10 these jam and the printer reports being out of paper. The frustration level does not justify the investiment.

K550dtn
I researched color printers, and wanted to find something that met these criteria:
1) Under $500
2) High quality photo printing (good inks)
3) Photos that do not fade once printed
4) Fast times for 'first page out'
5) Inks drain efficiently and can print more than 200 per cartridge

It turns out that Epson, Canon and hp were all worthy of researching. Those that speak highly of Epson and Canon have admitted that the newer hp printers; with the vivera inks and higher quality papers, fix the quality issues that they had seen with hp inkjet printers in the past.

I decided to buy the K550dtn and try it out. It prints quickly, and with the larger yield black cartridges, they can print up to 2500 pages of 5% black sheets. Compared to previous versions of hp printers, offering up to 200-300 pages of 5% black per cartridge, this was a great improvement.

Out of the box, one has to configure the ink heads and the cartridges, and priming took a little time to get right. Probably took about 30 minutes for this part, alone, but the drivers loaded once I put the entire CD contents on the computer and ran setup from that new directory. I have not done a side by side comparison, but for the average user, and part time photo enthusiast who wants to print quality 8" x 10" photos - as well as everything below this sizing - this is an excellent machine for this time period (beginning of 2007). The future holds more improvements, but for now, I am very very happy after printing over 1500 sheets of both photos and basic text.

Again, I am not a professional photographer (but I print their images!!) and I am only a novice photo person at best (more technical). Still, I am impressed with quality of output for daily prints, family gifts, and basic b&w printing. The initial mechanical set up (inks carts and priming) is for the patient person, not the plug and play person. Warranty support is a big help if you want to follow that path, but I did not.

I dropped it one star since it gave driver install issues with the CD, and the inital priming process was temperamental. Still, it is worth every penny.

Printer works great. The two paper trays work well and allows up to 600 sheets of the same paper or split it up with whatever color or type you want.
In addition I have added a continious ink supply kit to the printer which has amounted in a tremendous saving in ink purchases. Each color holds at least 100 ml of ink. I can set the printer to do a color job at best quality and have it run over night and not have to worry about the cartridges running out of ink. The Network function also works great. Other workstations can opt to use the printer if they have long print runs or their desktop printer fails.
after purchasing the first one, I have now purchased 3 more.

This is a very large home/office inkjet printer that prints at 600 x 600 dpi with normal text and images on plain paper [with optional PhotoREc enhancement for inkjet quality paper]. Resolution jumps up to 1200 x 1200 [4800x1200 optimised] when using photo paper. It's footprint is a reasonable 27 (width) x 47 cm (depth). However the [supplied] auto duplex unit must be fitted, and adds another 9cm to the rear. Plus the A4 paper output capture bar adds another 23 to 27cm to the front. The K550 takes three [Cyan, Magenta, Yellow] colour cartridges and one black - the supplied ones are the standard 10ml colour, 17ml black not the large 17ml and 48ml ones, but at least they aren't small `starter volumes'. The two print heads are separate and they fit into the internal printer moving head block - they can also be replaced if they get fail. The inks are fed from the cartridges via tubes, so the ink cartridges are very easy to fit via lift up flap in the front of the unit (and you don't press down on the delicate moving printer parts to fit them).

The printer is easy to set up, and has software options to reduce print ink (light), use the auto duplex, select default paper tray, to select inkjet or photopaper, and manual duplex. The top [250 sheet] tray 1, integrated into the printer, also has a lift up top to slide in paper for manual duplex or single paper feed (rather difficult to use). The larger capacity [350 sheet] under tray 2 is ideal for A4 plain paper. The paper trays clip in and out but they are rather fiddly to refit. The build quality is pretty good - it is all a bit plastic and looks better in the photos than in real life. It's not butt ugly though, but it is big and very black. It also bounces around a lot as it prints - as it prints very very fast when it gets going. It's very heavy weight keeps it fixed to the spot quite well. The K550dtn's print quality is also very good for text and graphics, and more than adequate for occasional photo-printing, and noticeably better than my old HP 950C it replaced. However if you mainly want to print photos you should also consider the dedicated 6-cartridge HP PhotoSmart D7360 photograph printer, also available from Amazon. This K550 printer, being a simple 3-cartridge colour system, should be a bit cheaper to run than a dedicated photo-printer.

The printer is fairly quiet when it prints, as it's all over very quickly, but when waking from sleep it does make more noise (it's still a lot quieter than a laser). So far the printer has worked perfectly - it does make a terrible grinding noise when it runs out of paper though. Plus the error LEDs aren't always easy to understand. Note that there are firmware upgrades to improve things, like reducing paper feed jams.

This printer is also available from Amazon as a cheaper basic K550, but the dtn suffix adds in the large 350 sheet paper tray 2, the auto-duplex unit and a wired network connection. The latter was the deciding factor for us as it meant we could plug the printer in via a network cable (not supplied) direct into our wireless router, so that we can print from any PC on the network without having to have any host PC switched on. Setting up via our network was very simple on all PCs using the supplied CD, the PC automatically found the printer on the network every time. You can still attach the printer directly to a PC via USB2 if you want (but then that PC has to be on to use the printer). We use the printer for home office stuff like letters, coloured graphics, school homework, and photos. So overall an excellent, versatile and rather obtrusive printer, that is easy to set up, produces quality output, and can create better photos than a colour laser when needed to. We are quite happy with it, although it is expensive to run as recycled ink cartridges aren't about yet. Checkout the K550dtn printer and it's siblings at hp's website.

I've had this a month or so now, to replace an ailing HP 970cse.
I particularly like the Separate individual color and black ink cartridges, the Duplexing (which I liked with the 970) it's speed and paper capacity. Projected cost-per-page appears to be very good.
It showed up on the network no-problem, it's FAST, and the quality even on bottom of the heap copy paper is quite good, much better than the 970 and certainly excellent Business Quality in any case. While I would not charactirize it as a full blown Photo Printer, for casual stuff it really does surprisingly well.

Bottom Line: As a highly capable Business Level High Speed Ink Jet it fully fills the requirements. I've separated my printer requirements between Business / Standard level and Photo Level now, and that really works out much better. I have an HP B9180 on order for my Photo Grade Work. It also filled in all my "check boxes" for a photo printer.

Relatively fast. Printing both sides is nice if you use paper that is thick (heavy) enough. Dual, large paper trays eliminates running out of paper mid job. Appears on my home network and is instantly usable by all computers. As usual, replacement printheads and cartridges will easily outrun the cost of this printer.