HP 100 Ink
Designjet 100 Ink Cartridges

HP 100 Printer Review

The HP DesignJet 100 is an inkjet printer that promises high quality and high precession. Costing around $1000, this unit is pretty expensive for a home printer, even for a photographer. However, it only prints 11 pages per minute, which is low for an inkjet printer of this price range, and it has a paper capacity of only 100. Printer ink, too, is a little pricey, though cheaper than some other models' ink, such as HP 940XL Yellow ink.

The DeskJet 100 is quite large weighing 43.6 pounds. Not only is it heavy, but its dimensions are 8x7x41x15.8 inches. In a small office or home setting, this will likely take up more room than most will like. Windows and Mac operating systems are both compatible with the unit. One reason it takes up so much room is because of the printer's capacity to print on up to 13x19 inch paper. Though this feature is becoming a standard slowly, most printers in this price range don't offer that setting. It is very versatile and economical, though for big companies, it is unable to handle capacities that other units can, such as the Phaser 8560 which features Xerox 108R00727 ink. Heavyweight coated, glossy, transparency, tracing paper and vellum are all supported by the HP 100. It has a USB port, and it actually comes with a USB cable so the user can start hooking up as soon as they get home. Computers aren't even needed for printing. Depending on what one's office needs, this could be just the machine to fit the bill. Similar, compatible models the Canon 100plus and 100ps are also available.

This unit uses four HP 100 ink cartridges - black, magenta, yellow and cyan. These HP 100 can be changed individually saving the buyer money in the long run by only changing what ink needs to be replaced. The DesignJet 100 inkjet unit has low ink consumption meaning the printer ink most likely won't need to be changed too often. However, when the HP 100 ink does need to be replaced, it will cost the buyer more than other products. The high page yield of 1,750 pages provides a lower cost per page than the Canon CLI-221C ink, for instance.

Consumer reviews for the printer are fairly negative. A few have had major maintenance problems and some have complained about the noise it makes. It also uses more HP 100 ink than promised, and it chews paper up often. The main problem with the inkjet unit is that it lacks reliability. It does have some interesting features that consumers will enjoy.