HP 1100D Review

The HP Business Inkjet 1100d printer offers great performance and exceptional color and black-and-white print quality for high-productivity individuals.

Summary

The HP 1100d is a great product and would fit the bill perfectly for a small business environment. Its ability to handle text, graphics and photos with speed and quality also make a nice fit into the home office market.  Medium to large businesses would find it less than desirable when compared to color laser printers.  While setup of the printer was easy as an experienced user, the inexperienced may have difficulty if the setup poster and getting started guide isn’t enough as there is little troubleshooting information or day-to-day usage information provided.  To keep things in perspective, it is a $199 printer and at that price has a ton of features. 

Introduction

The HP Business Inkjet 1100d printer offers great performance and exceptional color and black-and-white print quality for high-productivity individuals.  The 1100d is packed with a host of cost-saving features, including a low purchase price, automatic two-sided printing, modular ink-delivery system, and a user-friendly design.  These features allow budget minded small businesses or home offices to add color to their documents without sacrificing speed. 

Performance Enhancements

HP has done their homework on the 1100d as it incorporates several performance enhancements. 

• High Performance Architecture – Enhanced driver language (faster print speeds, enhanced print quality, improved network performance).
  
• Faster Carriage Motor – Up to 60 inches per second (ips).
  
• Larger Printheads – Four individual ink cartridges deliver up to 8 drops of ink in a single dot.
  
• Draft Mode Improvements – Improvements in the way the printer handles paper significantly reduces paper release time.
  
• Software and Firmware modifications
  
• Laser-quality speed – LQ speed of up to 4 pages-per-minute (ppm) black and color.  Prints as fast as entry-level color laser printer with comparable print quality. 
  
• Modular Ink Delivery System – Four individual printheads as well as individual ink cartridges for black, magenta, cyan and yellow inks. 

Design

The 1100d has a typical inkjet printer footprint at 19.48 W x 17.95 D x 8.46 H (inches) and weighs in at roughly 20 pounds.  The control panel is well laid out and clearly labeled.  It features out-of-ink indicators and three buttons: power, print-cancel, and resume.  The standard paper tray holds 150 sheets and is expandable to 400 sheets with

an optional 250 sheet tray.  The output tray can handle 80 sheets and has a convenient envelope slot.  The 1100d has two opening compartments, one over the printing area and one that covers the ink cartridges and printheads.  One feature we would have liked to see was a window over the printing area.  My personal preference is to take the occasional peek at the progress of the print.  The labels that adorn the underside of these doors are a nice touch.  The sticker underneath the print area door provides a legend for the different situations that may occur such as jammed paper, empty ink, almost empty ink, etc.  The sticker beneath the ink cartridge door provides graphical instruction on proper installation of the cartridges as well as the HP code numbers for the different cartridges.  This is very convenient if you’ve misplaced the manual or have already tossed the empty cartridges. 

Setup

The HP 1100d was extremely easy to setup.  Install the included driver, plug-in the power cord, plug-in the USB or parallel cable, and you’re finished.  The setup poster is useful as it points out where all the shipping tape is located and the correct orientation of the 4 printheads and 4 ink cartridges.  A separate insert is included to provide more detail on how the locking mechanism for the ink cartridges works.  If you require further documentation from HP regarding usage or troubleshooting you’ll need to head the HP support website as the supplied documentation does not provide that.  

Testing

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 completed document on the output tray.

The first round of tests for the 1100d were to time the printing of a typical 10-page MS Word document (black text, no graphics).  We used typical office inkjet printer paper.

MS Word Test 10 Page document results