The HP DeskJet 3050 is a popular all in one inkjet machine. It is popular for several reasons:
1). It is cheap, you can easily buy one for under 0;
2). It is an all in one machine: print, scan, and photocopy;
3). It has good quality for day to day use;
4). The Inks are cheap; and most importantly,
5). You even get wireless networking with it!
Plus! HP is kind enough to throw in a usb cable with it!
Anyway, let us get on with this HP DeskJet 3050 review. (Although from here on it is mostly technical stuff that you might not need to know, this is for those that want to get technical)
HP DeskJet 3050 Review: The Printing
The HP DeskJet 3050 is a thermal inkjet machine that prints both black & white and colour. It can do black and white at up to 20ppm, and colour at up to 5.5 ppm. While black and white printing yields a 600×600 dpi, colour printing does a humble 4800x1200dpi. However, if you are thinking of using it to print some pictures, you might be disappointed with the fact that it does not support boarder-less printing. If that is not an issues with you, the picture quality is quite acceptable. This printer has a 1000 page per month duty cycle, which is not bad for its intended setting of home and personal office use.
This printer comes with a 60 page input tray and a 25 page output tray for printing. It supports letter and legal size paper and 4×6, 5×7, 8×10, No.10 envelopes.
This printer is pretty quiet, printing at 6ppm it emits only 50dba.
There is no Duplex printing.
HP DeskJet 3050 Review: The Scanner
Having a flatbed scanner is what made this printer an all in one. It comes with a standard 8.5 x 11.7 inch 1200 by 1200dpi scanner bed. We wish to talk more about it, but there really isn't much, it is a standard scanner of which you use to photocopy or scan documents in to your computer. It will not scan negatives or transparent, it could, but you will not like the quality. There is no feeder for the scanner, you will have to scan page by page. It is fine if you are scanner a few documents at a time, but we don't recommend this unit if scanning is important for you.
HP DeskJet 3050 Review: The Photocopier
The photocopier is quite nice on this unit, it is not lighting fast, but it gets the job done. The HP DeskJet 3050 is capable of photocopying black & white at 4.5 copies per minute and colour at 2.5 copies per minute. Again this is fine for its intended purpose of home and personal office use.
HP DeskJet 3050 Review: Connections
There are two ways to connect the HP DeskJet 305o, via a USB 2.0 cable, which is included with the printer, or wireless networking on 802.11b/g/n. We find that the wireless setup is quite straight forward, if you have set up a router before this will be a piece of cake. Once connected it is quite nice to print from any computer within the network of your house. We can't stress how nice this feature is on a printer this cheap.
HP DeskJet 3050 Review: Power Consumption
HP have emphasized a lot on green printer with its new printers, and this unit is no exception. It has a power save feature that turns on automatically when not in use, which when activated, the printer will be in a standby mode and only consume 1.2 watts per hour, compare to regular standby mode that consumes 2.5 watts/hour. During operations it consumes 9 watts/hour which is very little.
HP DeskJet 3050 Review: The Price and Upkeep
Although this printer comes with an MSRP of 9.43, you can find one for under 0 without a problem. For the purpose of this review we found that this printer can be purchased anywhere from to its MSRP price. That being said, the upkeep for this unit is also quite reasonable, it uses the new HP 61 ink, which comes in black and tricolours. The back one can be found for .99 and the colour .99. There is also XL pack which has double the ink of the regular pack, those are priced at .99 and .99 respectively. According to hp, the regular pack can print 190 pages black and 160 pages colour, while the XL pack can print 480 pages black and 330 pages colour.
All in all, the HP Desk Jet 3050 is a really good printer and is well worth the dollar when used in its intended environment.
HP DeskJet 3050 Review: Gallery
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