HP DeskJet 9670 Review

The HP 9670 deskjet is a high performance, wide-format ink jet printer with photo printing and two-sided printing capabilities. Those with a creative side will love what the 9670 has to offer.

Summary

The versatile 9670 is great at what it does but comes with a high price tag. We had a tough time deciding exactly what environment (business, home office or personal) this printer would fit into. HP states that the 9670 is great for businesses, creative professionals and photography enthusiasts.   In a business environment where only black text documents are used this printer would be overkill.  The business that utilizes large spreadsheets and requires color printing will find the HP 9670 fits the bill perfectly.

In the personal printer market, the 9670 reproduces true-to-life photos from small to the really large and has the capability to spit out text documents quickly.  The high price tag may make the casual home user opt for a printer of a lesser scale unless large formats are desired.  You really need to desire the wide-format options for this to be the printer for you.

We view the HP9670 as a niche printer with its high-speed black text printing to the faithful reproductions of graphics and photos and large media capability. These capabilities allow it to span several bridges and become a jack-of-all-trades. 

Other points to consider are the multiple print options that allow the end user to select optimal print speed, optimal speed and quality or optimal quality.  The versatility in ink cartridges allows you to use four-ink (HP56 black and HP57 tri-color cartridges) for everyday printing of text, images and graphics and six-ink (HP58 photo and HP57 tri-color cartridges) for photo printing.  The features and benefits of the 9670 such as the ink backup mode, automatic paper-type sensor and the powerful software tools make this a well executed, user friendly ink jet printer.    

*Edit 10-30-03: We had the price originally listed at $599.99 but found out after the review that the price is actually $499.99. We have changed the price accordingly. Sorry for any confusion this may have caused.

Introduction

The HP 9670 is a high performance, wide-format ink jet printer with photo printing and two-sided printing capabilities.  It is marketed towards small business or home office users with a creative flare, but has features that would make it a good fit for large format color printing enthusiasts.  This unit can handle documents from envelopes all the way to 13inch by 19inch paper (SuperB). 

Design

As this is a wide-format printer, it has a big footprint.  It measures out at 23w x 18d x 7h.  This may be an issue with some home office users where desk space is at a premium.  The cabinet design is pleasing to the eye with its rounded corners and edges.  Most inkjet paper trays have a flimsy feel and often break with use, but the trays and opening doors on the 9670 have a strong sturdy feel when handled.  The input paper tray is clearly labeled for a multitude of paper widths.  A sliding tab is provided to ensure the paper is feed straight and true and also expands to accommodate paper sizes longer than letter size (A4, Legal, B4, A3, 11X17 and 13X19).  Similar to the input tray, the output tray has a manual paper guide slider as well as being extendable to accommodate longer paper and it tilts upward for easy access to the input tray below.  The top cover is frosted with a central clear window directly over the print heads.  Status and interaction (see Fig. 1) with the unit is via the lit power button, lit resume button, cancel button and two printer cartridge indicators.

Fig 1. HP 9670 User Controls 1

Features

Installing the HP 9670 was extremely easy.  The poster size setup sheet made the exercise fool proof. Included in the box was the instruction manual, the aforementioned setup poster, driver CD and power cord.  The software interface was very easy to understand and we were pleased to have a choice of not installing the HP photo software.  The photo software does incorporate new features and it may be worthwhile to take a look. One that caught our attention was the borderless photo printing and the booklet printing features.  The 9670 supports both parallel and USB connections and is both PC (Windows 98 and above) and Mac (OS X) compatible.  Wireless connectivity can be had with the optional HP Jet Direct wireless print server.

New features for this unit are:

• Fast Results – Black and white documents at 20 PPM and color at 15PPM
  
• Fade Resistant photos – HP uses a specially formulated photo ink (HP 58 Photo Ink) that produces long lasting (up to 73 years) photos when printed on HP Premium Plus photo paper.
  
• Flexible border printing – Choose to cover the entire surface of your print media.
  
• Cost savings – Save money on supplies by printing your documents on both sides using the automatic two-sided printing accessory (Standard on the 9670).
  
• Variety of media – With the built in paper type sensor you can eliminate the need to change paper type and print quality settings when special media is used.
  
• Low printer ink feature – Complete a print job even when one of the print cartridges runs out of ink by printing with the remaining cartridge.
  
• Print cartridge status – Left and right print cartridge lights blink to indicate when ink is low.
  
• Reduce power usage – Utilizes a power saver mode and auto-on printing
  
• Crisp, laser-quality black text and vibrant color – Professional print quality up to 1200 x 1200 dpi (black text) and 4800-optimized dpi with PhotoREt IV (color).
  

Performance

All tests were timed with a stopwatch.  Timing started when the click-to-print button was clicked and stopped when printing was complete and the paper on the output tray.

Test 1:

The first round of tests for the 9670 were to time the printing of a typical 10 page MS Word document (black text, no graphics).  We used typical office inkjet printer paper and the HP56 and HP57 ink cartridges. 

MS Word Test 10 Page document results