HP Deskjet 1220C Review

Overall Rating

This printer was bought in Oct of 2000.

Great print quality. A bit slow on some of the photo's, but a small sacrifice for high quality.

Fast... in draft mode, it flys. Quality greatly reduced, but it doesn't matter.
Of course size does matter here, and printing E sized CAD schematics, reduced to A size is why I bought it, or had my company by it for my office.
The HP Toolkit works great with older OS's.

Customer support did get better over the time of ownership, so kudos to HP for the effort.

Where should I start.... Let's see, the completely unreliable, frustrating, and annoying rear feed option. Forget about bypassing the rear feed and using the tray too. I have wasted more photo paper and large envelopes to this beast than I can count. When the rear feed does work, it only does so connected to an older OS (I'm using USB connectivity between several PC's). When connected to a newer uncompatible OS, from the driver standpoint, the printer instantly grabs the paper, doesn't feed all the way and continues shooting ink at blank targets.

Did I mention driver problems...forget about using the Toolbox and getting proper formatting with newer OS's.

Ink....buy stock in HP ink...you'll be rich. This printer goes through lots of ink. I used to by a single cartidge at a time, then pairs, now I get several pairs.

I have cleaned the rollers regularily, but other than normal paper, feed problems are starting to rear their ugly heads. Granted this is a problem with almost every inkjet, heck, all printers for that matter, so this could be attributed to high volume printing. Even so, at $550.00, it should have lasted a bit longer.

Margins....this is very irritating. For instance, MS Visio lets you see your print margins on the screen, and even by the ruler they agree with the printer settings. Forget about it, print out the drawing with line 1/64th of an inch from the max and it won't print. It turns out to be a crud shoot, sometimes it prints them, other times it won't.

Now for the biggest problem of all, it won't even turn on now. Sound's like a new printer to me.

All in all, if its normal paper, I only have the occasional hick up. But it's that 15 minutes trying to print out a single envelope that makes me want to beat it up. Rear feed, I can see why some of the newer ones don't have them. Photo paper won't even pick up any more.

If the printer's pickups would be more reliable, then half my problems would be solved. Updated drivers seems logical....but that would keep customers from buying new printers. Rear feed needs a tray.

Print out the sample photo of the gold nuggets being melted into bars on the 11x17 sample photo paper and see how many people can guess what it is. I get every thing from a magnified circuit to dumb looks, and the occasional right answer (this could be a "good point").