02/21/2007 - HP Designjet Review - Update

I have now had a chance to use the HP Designjet 130 for a little over two years. I received quite a few emails for additional information on the printer, and I thought it would be nice to post an update.

If you are considering purchasing the HP 130 (or he HP Designjet 90 – it’s 18” cousin) for printing photographic images, you need to be aware of its capabilities and its weaknesses.

I’ll start with its weaknesses.

Although the dye inks produce beautiful images on gloss or semi-gloss (satin) coated paper, printing on mat paper does not produce like results. The colors are dull and display nowhere near the vibrance when printing on mat or fine art paper. If you enjoy printing on mat paper, look for a pigment ink based printer or plan to have a second printer in your studio.

The same can be said for black and white. Printing a black and white image on any media is less than impressive. The printer has only one Black ink cartridge and seems to have a hard time producing truly neutral gray values by layering the various inks. This is less apparent on color images, but noticeable and quite distracting when printing fine art black and white images.

I have heard reports of being able to produce good black and white images using custom profiles or using the ImagePrint RIP, but I have not tried this. For my black and white images, I usually get excellent results using Epson printers, and in the near future will work with the new HP pigment based printers. (In particular, the new Z3100, a 24” to 44” wide format printer containing 12 pigment-based inks, four of which are black/gray, and the B9180 a 13” printer with eight pigment-based inks, three of which are lack/gray)

What the printer is good at, and it excels in this area, is printing color images with beautiful colors on glossy, semi-gloss, or satin paper. In fact, personally I use this printer ONLY for printing color images on HP’s Premium Plus Photo Satin paper. The results are gorgeous.

If you can live with these limitations, the printer is definitely still a bargain for a 24” printer.

If have any questions or would like to give me feedback, please don’t hesitate to shoot me an email at the address belowl.

FYI - I am planning to post a review of the new HP Z3100, once I have had a chance to use the printer.