HP rolls a color inkjet printer and copier into one affordable device.
Tony A. Bojorquez
Versatility is valued as highly in business as it is in the entertainment field. With this in mind, Hewlett-Packard has introduced a new kind of output device that's sure to win applause from busy workgroups. Street-priced at about $3,100, the HP CopyJet M teams a capable color inkjet printer with a built-in flatbed scanner, enabling it to serve as both a printer and a color copier.
Two for One
The new CopyJet M is as easy to set up and use as any Hewlett-Packard color inkjet printer. The difference is that a scanning device sits on top of the printer. In order to install the four ink cartridges -- cyan, magenta, yellow, and black -- you simply push a button on the side of the CopyJet M and the scanning component lifts up, allowing you to easily install the cartridges inside.
A long, narrow control panel in the shape of a quarter moon snaps onto the front of the CopyJet. Buttons on the panel let you select various options for printing and copying. There's an adjustable 180-sheet tray for letter-, legal-, or A4-sized pages. Unfortunately, the CopyJet M can't print labels or envelopes.
Built to accommodate the needs of mixed Mac and PC workgroups, the CopyJet M is equipped with 6 MB of memory, a parallel port, and an HP JetDirect print-server card that allows you to connect the device to either an Ethernet or a LocalTalk network. In addition, the CopyJet M comes with Adobe PostScript Level 2, enhanced PCL 5, and the HP-GL/2 plotting language and can automatically switch from one printer language to another. However, when the printer switches from PostScript to PCL 5 or vice versa, any fonts you've downloaded to the printer are erased -- this is especially annoying, because the printer lacks a SCSI port, so you can't connect a hard drive for storing downloaded fonts. A total of 35 Adobe Type 1 fonts are provided with the CopyJet M.
For printing, the CopyJet M is very similar to the discontinued HP DeskJet 1200C/PS inkjet printer. It prints color graphics at 300 dpi and black text and line art at 600 x 300 dpi. The printer software, a tweaked version of Apple's LaserWriter driver, allows you to select the print quality (Fast, Nor-mal, or Presentation), paper type (plain, coated, glossy, or transparency), and dith-er type (scatter or cluster) for graphic images.
If you have Apple's QuickDraw GX extension installed, you can take advantage of HP's proprietary ColorSmart Technology, which lets the printer make smart decisions about color and dithering for you, based on each element -- text, graphics, or photographic images -- on a page.
Taking Some Heat
Like the HP DeskJet 1200C/PS and the recently introduced DeskJet 1600CM, the CopyJet M has a built-in heater that dries ink quickly, minimizing paper wrinkling. The black-ink cartridge is rated for 900 pages at 5-percent coverage on letter-sized paper. For graphics, each cyan, yellow, and magenta cartridge is rated at 1,850 prints at 15-percent coverage. Each ink cartridge has a gauge, so you can easily see how much ink it contains, but you have to open the printer and look inside to see the gauges. It would be nice if the software warned you -- before you started to print -- when cartridges were running low.
At 7 cents per plain-paper copy, using the CopyJet M is a cheap alternative to using an outside copy center. Employing the CopyJet M as a copier is a no-brainer: You simply place a document on the scanner's glass surface and select the paper type (plain, inkjet, or transparency), the number of copies you want (99 maximum), zoom options, and copy quality.
The CopyJet M offers three quality settings: One is designed to accurately duplicate light colors, the second is for copying photographs, and the third produces the highest-quality color. If you decide you want to fiddle with ink intensities; adjust the amount of red, green, or blue; or change the vividness of the color, you can. The controls also let you reduce or enlarge images from 50 to 400 percent in 1-percent increments; eight handy preset percentages are available. When you're done, simply push the Start button and the CopyJet M duplicates your document at 300 dpi. Although the CopyJet M can't scan documents larger than 8.5 x 14 inches, its hinged removable cover lifts to accommodate books and other thick documents or objects.
While the CopyJet M is processing a print job, you can go ahead and set up a copy job, using the front panel. As soon as the print job finishes, the CopyJet M will automatically switch over to Copy mode and take care of your copy job -- pretty slick.
Print and Copy Quality
We noted a distinct difference between the CopyJet M's output quality for printed and copied documents. The quality of printed documents was good for plain paper and even better for coated stock and glossy media. Colors were vibrant, although not as vivid as those produced by the DeskJet 1600CM. For black text and line art, the CopyJet M employs HP's REt (Resolution Enhancement technology) to produce acceptable results, although again, not as impressive as the DeskJet 1600CM's crisp, sharp characters.
Our print-quality ratings are relative to results with other inkjet printers. Inkjet printers are the most affordable color printers, but you should consider quality issues when you compare their output with that of more-expensive color printers based on laser and solid-ink technology.
Although the CopyJet M's copied color documents don't look as good as the printed ones, the quality of photographic images is an improvement over what you get from traditional analog copiers. Still, quality suffers somewhat, due to the usual problems associated with inkjet technology. For example, we printed a color Adobe Illustrator file and then copied the results onto plain paper. Colors on the printed page were sharp and vivid, but the copied output looked dull by comparison. And a blue object actually appeared purple on the copied document -- a common problem with inkjet devices when they combine cyan and magenta to try to make blue.
Copied text looks surprisingly good, thanks to HP's text-enhancement technology, which looks for text and treats it differently from other elements on the page. Although copied text isn't as sharp as printed text, it's dense and quite legible.
Patience Required
You'll like the convenience and cost savings you get with the CopyJet M's copying capability, but the device is no speed demon. To make ten copies of a single letter-sized page of 12-point text, the CopyJet M took more than 3 minutes. At the highest-quality setting, it took nearly twice as long for the same job and the resulting text looked darker but not better. To make ten copies of a color document, the CopyJet M took 11 minutes in Normal mode.
The Bottom Line
Innovative and affordable, the HP CopyJet M color copier/printer kills two birds with one stone. It offers such a well-conceived and seamless integration of HP's scanner and inkjet-printer technology that the Hewlett-Packard folks must be wondering why they didn't think of it before. Because of the speed and quality limitations of inkjet technology, however, the best approach is to regard the CopyJet M as a secondary output device for office environments rather than as a one-stop solution for all of a workgroup's color-printing and -copying requirements.
HP CopyJet M
Rating: Very Good (4 of 5 mice)
Price: $3,649 (list).
Pros: Affordable printing and copying on plain paper. Well-designed integration of printer and scanner. Good text quality for copied documents.
Cons: ColorSmart requires QuickDraw GX. No SCSI port. Poor duplication of blue in copied documents. No support for envelopes and labels.
Company: Hewlett-Packard, Santa Clara, CA; 800-752-0900.
Reader Service: Circle #401.
DO YOU COPY? The HP CopyJet M's sleek control panel makes copying documents a breeze. If you're not happy with the results you get with the built-in quality settings (to the right of the LCD), you can fine-tune the ink intensities and the vividness of the color as well as adjust the amount of red, green, and blue. Copied documents on plain paper cost only about 7 cents each.
