The HP DeskJet 815C is one of those pieces of hardware that makes the day it arrives feel like Christmas. It jumps out of the box looking sleek and ready to make your printing fantasies come true. In fact, getting out of the box is one of its best features.
Not that it actually gets out by itself, but close. It is so light that you can easily balance it in one hand while getting those pesky styrofoam thingies off, and it looks sturdy enough to handle a fall.
Before you get to the unpacking, you run into the two installation posters - one each for Universal Serial BUS and parallel cable setup. These have the exact instructions you would find in the user guide, except in big, friendly pictures. It is nice to know that some companies are realising that nobody actually reads those things.
So between the good balance and the posters it takes just more than seven-and-a-half minutes from opening the box to printing a test page. Okay, so everything was ready and waiting, but if it takes you more than 15 minutes to set-up you should probably feel inferior.
Step-by-step
The driver installation is a joke. The wizard that pops up to guide you through installation does not really need your help, and you get the suspicion that being prompted to push the "next" button is meant only to make you feel involved in the process. But don`t think it is not functional. Every setting you like to fiddle with is there, only you don`t need to fiddle if you don`t want to.
And this little baby does not let you down after all the suspense. The colour balance is sweet on the eye, the lines are sharp and it is surprisingly fast on pages with mixed text and graphics. You can actually see the difference to the quality with PhotoREt II, which can blend 16 ink droplets on a single pixel.
It prints very, very quietly; the declared sound pressure level of 42dB is probably an understatement. On a longer colour job it is easy to forget that it is working at all, and it scares the hell out of you when the page suddenly pops out. Many games of solitaire were wrecked during the writing of this review.
Some functions are real lifesavers. Auto-on when left in standby mode saves trouble when your printer is out of reach, and reverse order printing is wonderful on those 500 page novel prints, as is double-sided printing.
At a recommended retail price of between R1 700 and R1 800 it is hard to find fault with the DeskJet 815C. It might be a little slow for office use, and it is not the cheapest colour printer on the market, but it fills a niche for the home user who wants a little more than average printing.
The smaller 21ml black ink cartridge could be a hassle for more demanding users, but then again, it is a benefit for those who find half-full 41ml cartridges drying up after a few months.
The Bottom Line
Printing speeds:
Black text
Econofast quality: 7.5 pages per minute (ppm)
Best possible quality: 4ppm
Full colour
Econofast quality: 1.4ppm
Best possible quality: 0.2ppm
Duty cycle: 1 000 pages per month
Platforms: Windows 3.1, 95, 98, NT 4.0, MacOS
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