I promised @newpersn in an earlier thread that I'd post thoughts on the HP OfficeJet Pro x451dw / x585z printers, and I figure they'd be useful to a few people as on the face of it, they seem ideal for education, and almost too good to be true.
Some background on why I'm writing this: our current printer contract is up in November, and one supplier (Landscape) proposed these HP printers where everyone else offered the usual mix of laser devices. I'd not heard about the technology, nor seen any of them in action, so we've had two demo units out.
TL;DR: we liked these printers, and especially their pricing, enough to select them as our new printer fleet for the next 5 years. They are cheap to run, easy to maintain, and good enough quality for education purposes. You should be looking into them.
The Technology
The OfficeJet Pro X printers use HP's PageWide technology (PDF) (further reading). In brief: they're inkjets, but instead of a print head moving across the paper, a series of modules are lined up across the width of the page and the paper moves underneath them. In that regard they're similar to a laser printer.
The advantage is that, unlike laser, the consumables situation is incredibly easy. Instead of toner + drum + belt + fuser, with toner powder ending up everywhere and degrading print quality (which has been a particular problem for us with Oki ES4140s), there's an ink cartridge. It clicks in and out like an SD card. It's laughably simple, and should take up a lot less space on our shelves than all the current nonsense.
Seriously. Watch:
OfficeJet Pro X451DW
The X451DW will be our entry-level printer in the majority of classrooms. It prints at 55 pages per minute in General Office (effectively draft) in full colour, though duplex obviously slows things down. I have tested that speed, albeit only by using my phone as a stopwatch, but it does hold up. These things are fast.
The printer is quite sizeable. The X451DW is around 20% wider than our current A4 mono devices, and due to the paper path the multi-purpose tray is on the left-hand side, not the front. Bear it in mind if your space is limited. It's also a pretty hefty device: I could just about manage to carry it about on my own.
OfficeJet Pro X585Z Flow
The X585Z is the top-of-the-line A4 multi-function device, that will be going into select offices for copy/scan/fax. It's based on the X555DN printer, which we'll also have in a few high-volume areas (e.g. IT suites). This monster is even faster @ 70ppm in General Office -- again, I've checked that -- and is similar in size & layout to the X451DW, about 4 inches deeper and a bit higher for the MFD gubbins.
The MFD accoutrements of this device are actually quite cool, sad as it is to admit. Not only does it have an 8" colour touchscreen on a hinge (it lays flat and can be raised through 90 degrees to vertical), it has a little pull out keyboard to type on.
Print Quality
In summary, before I get to specific test print samples, it's Good Enough. Yes, you can tell it's inkjet: the edges of the text aren't as straight and crisp as laser, even on ColorLok paper; you can only really see this under magnification but you can tell at a glance. The blacks aren't as black as a laser, either. Pictures have got a slight dithering pattern to them, and don't have as much contrast as a laser print (more on this later, though - it's arguably more accurate). However, all of this is only really noticeable when you hold it side-by-side with a laser print. Taken on its own merits, it is absolutely fine. I know for a fact that we, as IT Support, are being fussy (it's our job to notice these details); when I show prints to non-technical staff, they've had absolutely no complaints. These printers will largely be for student work, so quality only needs to be good enough anyway.
General Office is the renamed version of Draft quality, and the quality used for all the page-per-minute figures. Text is ever so slightly lighter in tone, but the main difference is that images are downsampled to 300dpi. Personally I can see the pixellation and aliasing caused by this, but again it seems that we are being fussy -- teaching staff don't notice until it's pointed out with comparison to a higher quality setting.
Above that, you have Professional ("Normal") and Presentation ("High Quality"). Blacks are slightly blacker, pictures are printed at 600dpi, and print speed drops by a third -- so about 36ppm for the x451dw and 47ppm on the x555dn/x585z. Beyond that, I can't actually tell the difference between these two settings. There's a series of detailed adjustments you can make to ink density and drying time etc. and all these really do is slow things down without any significant improvement in quality.
Practically speaking, then, we're defaulting all devices to General Office. It's good enough for everyone we've shown, and Professional is there for when the image quality is important.
The ink dries immediately: I have tried, and it is all but impossible to smudge it. The only time I have ever managed to smudge any ink was to print a full sheet of pure black, take it straight off the output tray and rub my fist over it hard enough to rip the paper. Normal printing is absolutely fine. The paper does wrinkle slightly when printing images, but on the other hand, it never curls from going through a hot fuser.
Print Samples
I ran through a fairly thorough set of test prints with the X451DW and compared to our existing fleet of Oki printers (ES4140 for mono, ES6410 for colour). These samples were all scanned in @ 600dpi on our Oki ES8460. It's not an ideal way for you to see the print quality, so if you can get a demo device for yourselves, do.
Open all these images in a new tab - they're about 5000 x 7000 pixels each.
X451DW CUPS test file:
This shows the dithering in the colour wheel, and the resolution in the radial lines wheel (ignore the smudging, that's the scanner; the size of the black blob is what's relevant).
Oki ES6410 CUPS test file:
Against a comparable colour laser, the X451DW holds up well; the size of the black blob in that radial lines wheel is similar. In draft quality on the x451dw, that blob is much larger as a result of the downsampling to 300dpi, but for Normal quality it's easily the equal.
X451DW DataColor test file:
This is the test sheet used for display calibration with DataColor Spyders, which is what we use for our monitor calibrations. Again, the scanner quality doesn't help here, but what is useful to note is the Gamma chart at the top right; the bottom 2-3 squares are difficult to tell apart, whereas...
ES6410 DataColor test file:
...the bottom 4-5 on the laser are indistinguishable. This is why, at a glance, the laser prints are more impressive: they have more contrast because they're crushing the blacks. It's a false impression, based on inaccuracy. The colour balance of the laser is more accurate though (when compared to the same image on a calibrated LG IPS monitor). The x451dw's prints have a shift towards the green out of the box. Potentially it's something that can be fixed with a colour profile for Photoshop, as the X585Z at least doesn't seem to have menu options to try and correct this.
General Office vs. Professional quality
General Office:
Professional:
Not as straightforward to tell with these scans as it is in real life, but if you look at the pyramid pie chart, you can see the pixellation around the outside of the circle and on the diagonals of the pyramid for General Office. The cheesy stock photo is noticeably pixellated in the former as well. Text is just as crisp in both, although at this scan resolution you can see the dithering in General Office that makes it appear a little lighter in tone.
HP Flow technology
The X585Z is the top end multi-function device, implementing the HP Flow platform.
This stuff is brilliant.
Apart from the advantage of the 8" colour touchscreen and the physical keyboard (I cannot overstate how useful this is), the range of options is bewildering. You can set up your own custom shortcuts, to appear either on the home screen or in a Quick Sets folder, and set them either to be one-push actions (e.g. tap button, scan is emailed to configured recipient) or to open the relevant application with presets tweaked (to allow changes to be made). The document feeder can handle 100 sheets. It's a truly duplex scanner, with two scan heads, so it scans both sides in one pass. It can detect and automatically remove blank pages, so you can just duplex scan all the time. It can do OCR to produce Searchable PDFs (or RTF or HTML...) and it does so surprisingly well. Once a document has gone through the scanner (which it does very quickly, without pauses - 66 images per minute even in duplex) you can queue up the next job while it continues to process the first. It can scan to network, email, USB and SharePoint.
It's an MFD that's got me excited about MFDs. If that's not a recommendation, I don't know what is.
Pricing
The devices are not the cheapest to purchase, especially with the 5 year CarePack. We're buying the fleet outright as a capital purchase, as it works out cheaper than leasing.
What is cheap, though, are the running costs. We were quoted a representative cost of 0.6p mono and 3.5p colour on the x451dw, and only 0.44p mono and 2.9p colour on the x555dn/x585z.
I ran the figures against our 2014 usage. Our current contract cost us £19,677 including lease & usage. The HP Managed Print Solution would have only cost us £12,178. That's 40% cheaper, despite the higher lease cost per quarter (dividing the capital purchase by 20). The more we print -- and print volumes have risen steadily over the last five years, despite all our best efforts to the contrary -- the cheaper it gets relative to other proposals.
Summary
So these printers are cheaper to run, faster to print, easier to maintain with only inks to change (and they last as long as toners, I should point out - 9.2k black, 6.6k colour), supposedly more reliable with all sorts of fancy paper-jam detection (I've never had one), allow for colour devices everywhere (which we'll restrict in software with PCounter) and a match for lasers in quality.
I'm convinced.
Might take me a few years of saving at an average of £11k a year for a full-time writer, mind...
