Box, Printer and Installation: The packaging of the product is very basic and nothing that particularly stands out. Once you take out the printer, you will find that it’s a bit bulky in size and looks somewhat dated; it’s obviously not based on the recent chic designs we’ve seen on the Pixma series.

The printer comes with a power cable, drivers and a quick setup guide. Since there was no USB cable in the box, make sure you have a spare lying around before you start the installation process. This non-bundling of a data cable is quite strange actually, but perhaps this is what HP needs to do to cut costs.

The printer has a slightly different implementation of the traditional inkjet with cartridges; it has separate heads and ink tanks so when you are done with the ink, simply buy a new cartridge and keep using the same print head. This obviously implies cost savings for you, as buying the ink tank is considerably cheaper than buying an ink tank with a print head.

The ink cartridges and the print heads go inside a right hand side panel, which opens similarly to a car’s bonnet. As part of the package, HP bundles a 28ml black cartridge and 14ml C.M.Y cartridges. You can purchase higher capacity tanks (69 ml for black and 28 ml C.M.Y. cartridges) from HP or from a retail store for approximately $34.00 each.

The center of the printer consists of three buttons: one for canceling task, one for power and one for page in/resume. The page in/resume button also acts as a print head aligner if you press and hold it for sometime.

The input tray has a 150 page capacity while the output capacity is capped at 80. It connects to the PC using a USB 2.0 cable, which brings us to the installation part. Earlier, whenever we have tried installing an HP printer, the software seemed to take forever to install. The installation also has a quirk wherein we need to connect the device at a specific time for the process to work flawlessly. While the latter is still true, the software has been updated, and installing this printer was quick and hassle free - kudos to HP for fixing the issue and increasing the overall productivity.

Getting to the printer itself, we first ran a couple of test prints just to see if everything was working correctly and the heads, nozzles and everything else that needs to be aligned was properly so. Once we were sure of the printer’s setup, we moved onto our final performance tests.

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