The Hewlett Packard 640C DeskJet is a colour inkjet printer, which, in my humble opinion & experience produces good results & is not expensive to buy or run.
When you buy your 640C, you get a fair sized, strong box, which protects the contents very nicely indeed. Inside the package is the printer (well packaged & protected), the driver disk, colour & black cartridges, power cable, user manual (very helpful & easy to read) & a large poster which explains in very detailed graphics how to install your printer. The working/moving parts of the printer are well secured with sticky tape which will protect them whilst in transit. The printer carriage is protected also & will not move about or get damaged, even if you drop the box! The box itself is a good thick strong one with good handles…that will not break easily!
Connecting the printer to your PC is done in either of two ways, USB or parallel port. You do not get any of these cables so decide which is the best way to connect the printer & buy the required cable if you haven’t already got one. There are very few printers now that come with the connecting cables so for the 640C this is not a mark against it. Most of us already have a printer cable so you should be okay there.
Installation is quick, easy & painless. Once you’ve connected the printer to the PC via your chosen method, it’s just a case of booting up your PC & then when the New Hardware Wizard finds the printer, & clicking no when the Wizard wants to find the drivers. This is the time to put your driver disk into your CD drive & it will autoplay & install the printer for you. It is as simple as that! In all it takes about 5 minutes to connect & install your new printer.
What cartridges do you get & how much are the replacements? You get a colour cartridge (lite user) & a black cartridge (lite user). Both cartridges fir into the printer at the same time which saves you having to change between colour & black depending on what you8 are printing.
The lite user colour cartridge cost around £20, the black lite user costs about £18, colour heavy use costs about £26 & black heavy use costs about £24. A good point in favour of the 640C is the price of the Photo quality cartridge. It costs only £15 for the photo cartridge, which in my humble opinion is a total bargain! Compare these prices to the likes of cartridges for Lexmark printers & you will find a big difference. You can save a good bit of money over a short space of time if you use your printer a lot. Even if you do not go through many cartridges, you will still save a few quid.
Print quality is very good compared to printers of the same price & some dearer ones. The 640C is good and knocks spots off the likes of the Lexmark Z11, Z22 & some others. I have had about seven printers over the years & so far, the 640c is the best of the bunch. It beats all the rest that I have had on price, speed, quality & cartridge replacement prices.
I do not know how many pages the 640C is supposed to spit out per minute but I do know that it is a nippy printer, in both colour & black & white! It is not a question of how many dots per inch in quality terms either as the printer control program has a rather nice slider bar instead. This is handy for those who do not really understand DPI & quality. When it comes to photo printing, you just remove your normal colour cartridge & replace it with your photo cartridge. Then tick the ‘photo cartridge installed’ box in the printer control program & hey presto you are sorted for printing out photo quality pictures. The printer control program is very easy to use & there is a great ’Help’ system if you are stuck with any of the settings that you can adjust.
In all, for £70 you get a great printer that’s well made, well packaged, has all you need to get you up & running (minus the connection cable, but you already have one if you have a printer) & is very good value for your hard earned cash, which you probably got from Ciao! The 640C is quite fast & gives good quality prints time & time again & not badly priced either.
That’s it for another opinion. Thanks for taking the time to read my rantings & ravings &take care!
Regards….Paddy (Tom)