This printer was shown at the GITEX show in Dubai, it is made from 24 carrot gold and is supposedly part of numerous gold and silver HP Laserjet P2015s. Its a perfectly working prototype and an auction was held with a starting price of $299 after the event.
Let’s do amazing! That is the slogan for HPs new advertising campaign. But what does it mean, maybe this video can help explain a bit:
This excellent advertisement was made by Matt Robinson and Tom Wrigglesworth in response to a D&AD Student Awards brief set by HP. The video was made with the concept of “Presenting an idea which promotes HP Workstations ability to bring to life anything the creative mind can conceive” and does indeed portray that idea.
Lately HP seem to be questioned a lot about their cartridge prices, and there’s no reason why they shouldn’t be. The reason this has come to mind is because I have been looking at the page yield for a couple of HP cartridges on the official HP site. For those of you who don’t know, page yield is basically the number of pages you can print with a give printer and cartridge.
The cartridge product pages on the HP site do specify the approximate cartridge yield, but they do not specify what the cartridge yield is based on and to find this out on the HP site is almost impossible. HP use the the ISO 24711 testing guidelines, for more information you can go to this page on the HP site: http://h10060.www1.hp.com/pageyield/articles/uk/en/IsoInkjetYield.html (had to bookmark it to be able to find it again). But basically they print out 5 test pages (image on the right) one after the other over and over again until the printer says the cartridge is empty.
Although you would think that the tests are carried out to give the buyer an insight into how many pages they will get out of their cartridge, HP state that the results they get may not be what you will experience for regular every day printing. One of the reasons for this is that when you use your printer at home, you will usually print out one or a couple of pages and then not use the printer again until you next need to, and while your printer is not printing it will still use ink to keep the nozzle clear. Whereas when HP do their tests they will print continuously and because of this get more pages out of the ink cartridge.
To be fair, all this information is on the HP site, the only problem is finding it. I’m sure a regular buyer doesn’t want to trail round the site looking for this information when all they want is to quickly buy an ink cartridge.
In case you’re wondering just what to do with your empty ink cartridges, we’ve come up with a few fun do’s and don’ts.
Over the year I have discovered, as many of you also will have, that one of the most annoying and sometimes difficult tasks when installing a new computer device is finding the right drivers. This is the case even more so now with the windows 7 compatibility issues, looking for the right drivers for your printer can be a daunting task.
So with this in mind I have compiled a list of the top 4 driver sites that you can download your HP printer drives from:
With all these sites available, you are bound to be able to find the right driver and if not then google is your next option.
HP have been one of the leaders in the printer industry for years, and with the help of Stratasy they are taking their products to a whole new level with 3D printers.
HP and Stratasys have made plans to release 3D printers later this year, but don’t get too exited about having your own 3D printer on your desk at home as they are currently only used by large companies and even though the two companies will be introducing the system into the ‘mainstream’, you would still be looking at anything from $15.000 upwards to buy one.
Although HP and Stratasys will be the ones to introduce 3D printers to the mainstream, these devices have been around since around 1986. So the technology is far from new, it just shows you how slow technology can advance sometimes.
This type of printer work by either building up layers of fine powder (usually plaster or resins), feeding liquids through a printhead to build up layers or in this case use fused deposition modeling that uses a nozzle to deposit molten plastic layer by layer eventually forming a 3D model.
Although these machines currently cost a fortune some companies (makerbot.com) will supply a DIY kit so you can build one yourself for under £1000.
Buy an original HP 350 ink cartridge here.
Buy a remanufactured HP 350 ink cartridge here.
Is it just me or is everything getting smaller in life? From the latest nano-gadget to the humble Mars bar smaller seems to be better these days…or is it? One thing that has got smaller, and not for the better is the HP printer cartridge and the level of ink that is in it. We are constantly looking to add value for our customers so we decided to run some tests on the ink levels of original ink cartridges and how they stand against our own remanufactured cartridges. We will be running more tests on other printer cartridges but on this occasion we are looking at the HP 350 CB335EE standard ink level cartridge.
Here is how we did it…….
We started by removing the top of an empty HP350 genuine ink cartridge. After removing the top we found a single chamber filled with a square shaped hydrophobic sponge. The sponge is used to hold the ink until the print head calls for it when printing. When removing the sponge and examining it the first thing we noticed was that the ink level where the OEM ink had been only covered less than a quarter of the sponge from the bottom upwards, the top ¾ of the sponge was totally ink free and clean. HP spec’s state that the HP 350 cartridge has 4.5ml of ink inside, we have a hunch that this is more related to price than the physical cartridge capabilities and to prove our point we decided to see just how much ink we could get into the hp 350 without flooding the sponge and affecting its hydrophobic properties.
We started with a bunch of empty original HP 350 CB335EE cartridges that had been used only once, using one of our vacuum filling machines we set about filling cartridges at different levels of ink and vacuum rates, we steadily increased the ink levels until we overfilled cartridges and then worked backwards until we found the optimum limits without compromising the ink cartridges functionality. Our test showed that between 18 and 20ml of ink, yes 18 to 20ml! (Depending on the vacuum and vent rate) could be safely added, quite a difference from 4.5ml’s don’t you think?
Physically filling a cartridge with ink is one thing, making it work in the printer is another, pleased with the progress so far we then took the cartridge to our test bed of printers, the printer we chose to test it on was the HP Photosmart C4480 . After a quick clean of the circuitry we popped it in the printer and waited it for it to finishing whirring, whilst we waited the conversations between our technicians were “will it actually print so heavy with ink?” “Can the sponge hold the extra ink without a flood of ink on the page?” The printer was ready so it’s time to find out. We ran off pages of our black test sheet on DRAFT, NORMAL and HIGH dpi setting and the result was good news, the cartridge didn’t leak on the page and it showed no problems carrying the extra ink. The print was just as crisp and sharp as the same cartridge filled with HP’s recommended 4.5ml. Hp guide lines on actual pages per cartridge are based on 5% coverage with the printer set on Default or Normal mode. To test this HP 350 we used our specially designed test page that has coverage of around 80% to check the cartridge at high level output, the print was clean and consistent without any lines.
Now that we had discovered that the cartridge can physically hold more ink the question is how long our maxi filled HP 350 will last compared to the original? We continued to run tests but this time we adjusted our Photosmart printer to match the settings quoted in HP’s guidelines and Suprise! Suprise! we found that our remanufactured/refilled cartridge lasted on average 3 to 4 times longer than the HP original ink cartridge. Our conclusion was that just as we thought the HP’s 4.5ml of ink in the HP 350 is more about money! We found that recently emptied HP 350 when filled with the correct ink formula under the correct vacuum conditions produces unrivalled quality equal to the (OEM) original brand.
More tests coming soon so please come back and check frequently, please feel free to leave a comment.
