HP Deskjet 932C by Marty Sems

Once in awhile, an inexpensive gem of an inkjet printer comes our way. We'll shed our dignity here and simply worship Hewlett-Packard's new Deskjet 932C ($199 Estimated Street Price[ESP]). This rising star blew us away on both plain and photographic paper.

You can connect the 932C to your PC or Macintosh via parallel or universal serial bus (USB) cable (not included.) At just 7.7 inches high x 17.3 inches wide x 15.7 inches deep, this trim unit is designed for cramped spaces, such as dorm room desks. Its feeder tray holds up to 100 sheets or 15 envelopes.

We put the 932C through our usual battery of tests on an IBM 300 megahertz (MHz) Pentium II PC with 64 megabytes (MB) of random-access memory (RAM) and Windows 98. Like most other printers, the 932C didn't print as fast as the manufacturer claimed, even adjusting for different print resolutions. Still, 5.4 pages per minute (ppm) for 10 draft-quality text pages is nice and speedy for an inkjet. We timed our three-page PowerPoint presentation at 1.5ppm through the 932C, our six-page Word text/graphics document at 1.3ppm, and a full-page Adobe Photoshop photograph in Best color mode at 0.17ppm (which is smokingly fast compared to most other inkjet printers.)

Here's the best part. We couldn't get the 932C to look bad. Its rendition of our full-page photo of flowers was one of the finest we've ever seen on photographic paper. The colors were almost overpowering in their saturation, but no detail was left out, and the entire image was extremely fine-grained. The same photo on plain paper was necessarily more muted, but nonetheless exquisite compared to the competition. We have seen crisper text in the $499 (ESP) HP PhotoSmart P1100 and a short list of others, but both the normal 600 x 600 dots per inch (dpi) and the draft 300 x 300 dpi text was much better than average. The 932C's plain paper performance in our Word and PowerPoint documents was almost flawless, with no bleeding or other funny stuff. The 932C simply couldn't produce a bad image.

This printer's large black ink cartridge ($28.79 ESP) prints a bountiful 833 pages, while a $19.99 (ESP) economy unit will still print a healthy 415 pages. The 932C's color cartridges are also available in large (970 pages for $59.99 ESP) and economy (450 pages for $33.59 ESP) versions.

The Deskjet 932C packs a large 4MB buffer, which helps it print photos without unduly burdening the computer. The printer is capable of a high duty cycle of 2,000 pages a month. Its one-year warranty includes 90 days' free phone support at (208) 344-4131. You can even connect more than one computer to this HP using your house's phone wiring and a new JetDirect 70X Home Print Server (unpriced at press time), scheduled to be released in March 2000.

This inkjet has nearly all the star qualities of the PhotoSmart P1100, shedding the digital camera memory card slots for a $300 savings. With its amazing print quality, high speeds, and economic cartridges, HP's Deskjet 932C has set a new standard at the $199 price point.