The HP Deskjet D1660 is an entry level printer & can be picked up up for as little as £30 online.
As you might expect , the design of the printer is pretty simple. It has average width for an A4 printer, but is considerably less deep than most. It uses HP’s trademark print path which takes paper from, in this case, a fold-down tray at the front and feeds it back out on top of the input stack. There is no output tray, but the technique is basic and works surprisingly well. As there’s no cover to the paper sheets, you’ll in all likelihood want to remove and store them when you’re not printing, which is a bit fiddly .
This machine does not have a lcd display or control panel of any kind, just a single button for turning the printer on and off .
This printer uses two hp ink cartridges and they are numbered hp 300 color and 300 black, there are high and low capacity versions available.
Speed wise, HP quote print speeds of up to 20 pages per minute, but these are draft mode speeds, so not truly in the real world. We measured speed at about 4.5 pages per minute with our 5 page text document. .
When printing, the machine took about 20 seconds to get going, so our 20 page document worked out at about 5.5 pages per minute .
The quality of prints from the machine is very good. Black text is remarkably clean for an entry-level inkjet printer, with little ink bleed into the paper, thus giving sharp and readable text, down to small point sizes .
Photo prints in best mode on good quality photo paper were very good especially at this price point. Colours were natural and plenty of detail was evident.
Using the XL version ink cartridges is the cheapest way to print as the standard capacity cartridges have very little ink capacity.
Verdict
This printer is good value for money . It’s very easy to use and in most ways just gets on with the job. Facilities are basic , but it’s reasonably quick for its class and produces high quality output. If money is tight, the Deskjet D1660 is a good place to spend it.