Digital Trends

HP DeskJet 9670

October 27th, 2003 | by Rob Curtis

Introduction

The HP 9670 is a high performance, wide-format ink jet printer with photo printing and two-sided printing capabilities.  It is marketed towards small business or home office users with a creative flare, but has features that would make it a good fit for large format color printing enthusiasts.  This unit can handle documents from envelopes all the way to 13inch by 19inch paper (SuperB). 

Design

As this is a wide-format printer, it has a big footprint.  It measures out at 23w x 18d x 7h.  This may be an issue with some home office users where desk space is at a premium.  The cabinet design is pleasing to the eye with its rounded corners and edges.  Most inkjet paper trays have a flimsy feel and often break with use, but the trays and opening doors on the 9670 have a strong sturdy feel when handled.  The input paper tray is clearly labeled for a multitude of paper widths.  A sliding tab is provided to ensure the paper is feed straight and true and also expands to accommodate paper sizes longer than letter size (A4, Legal, B4, A3, 11X17 and 13X19).  Similar to the input tray, the output tray has a manual paper guide slider as well as being extendable to accommodate longer paper and it tilts upward for easy access to the input tray below.  The top cover is frosted with a central clear window directly over the print heads.  Status and interaction (see Fig. 1) with the unit is via the lit power button, lit resume button, cancel button and two printer cartridge indicators.

Fig 1. HP 9670 User Controls 1

Features

Installing the HP 9670 was extremely easy.  The poster size setup sheet made the exercise fool proof. Included in the box was the instruction manual, the aforementioned setup poster, driver CD and power cord.  The software interface was very easy to understand and we were pleased to have a choice of not installing the HP photo software.  The photo software does incorporate new features and it may be worthwhile to take a look. One that caught our attention was the borderless photo printing and the booklet printing features.  The 9670 supports both parallel and USB connections and is both PC (Windows 98 and above) and Mac (OS X) compatible.  Wireless connectivity can be had with the optional HP Jet Direct wireless print server.

New features for this unit are:

• Fast Results — Black and white documents at 20 PPM and color at 15PPM
• Fade Resistant photos — HP uses a specially formulated photo ink (HP 58 Photo Ink) that produces long lasting (up to 73 years) photos when printed on HP Premium Plus photo paper.
• Flexible border printing — Choose to cover the entire surface of your print media.
• Cost savings — Save money on supplies by printing your documents on both sides using the automatic two-sided printing accessory (Standard on the 9670).
• Variety of media — With the built in paper type sensor you can eliminate the need to change paper type and print quality settings when special media is used.
• Low printer ink feature — Complete a print job even when one of the print cartridges runs out of ink by printing with the remaining cartridge.
• Print cartridge status — Left and right print cartridge lights blink to indicate when ink is low.
• Reduce power usage — Utilizes a power saver mode and auto-on printing
• Crisp, laser-quality black text and vibrant color — Professional print quality up to 1200 x 1200 dpi (black text) and 4800-optimized dpi with PhotoREt IV (color).