HP Deskjet 6940 Color Inkjet Printer review

If you are looking for a printer that is sturdily made, inexpensive, compact, good looking, quite, providing an outstanding printing quality, reliable and equipped with some excellent features, such as the covered paper tray and a port for a camera to hook up to to print out, you surely will appreciate the HP Deskjet 6940 which is, according to many enthusiastic users, a true success. It is also ideal for small business applications as it is easy to set up, fast and easy to operate.

The printer settings on the computer are easy to use, and although only an ethernet attachment is provided, the USB port works perfectly well with a standard USB cable, which has to be purchased separately.

The HP Deskjet 6940 is fast and prints nicely at the fast settings, which are the low ink usage ones. At higher quality settings it prints really great with a very clear and crisp type. Black text prints super-fast, while colors are vibrant, even though some business users would have appreciated it did two-sided printing too.

The paper just oozes out of the printer taking hardly anytime at all, though the absence of a tray to catch them when they come out may be a little annoying, as the little slide out isn’t long enough for regular paper. However, it seems that pulling in a clump and printing the document partially onto three or four sheets it’s something definitely belonging to the past for the users of the HP Deskjet 6940, as this printer actually pulls in one sheet of paper at a time, if you put more than one sheet in. Also, The slide through envelope slot makes singles an absolute breeze to print.

Those who use to print B&W photos would be enthusiasts of the HP PhotoSmart Premier software that comes with the printer. You won’t reach the same “darkroom quality” level using Photoshop or Photoshop Elements and you don’t have to change any settings or anything - it just prints the B&W's much better! Further better results can be reached using the HP Premium Plus Photo paper, on which your photo prints will look absolutely professional.

The printer does not support Quicken or Quickbooks printing, unless a third party check writing software is installed. This is a "known issue" with no fix, which is not described on the box, in the product literature or in the official HP Website.

The HP Deskjet 6940 is perfect for those users that don’t want to have five or six cartridges to set-up or change, as this one only has two: the black and the color cartridge.

The color seems to be excellent and the printer comes with long lasting cartridges, even for relatively large printing volumes, especially if you use the fast drafting mode often, because they are really full cartridges and not sample ones, as somebody may think. So there is absolutely no need to buy further cartridges when you purchase the printer. Of coarse, if you do a lot of draft printings every time you need to print something this may not be true.

The set up is really easy with the enclosed ethernet cable. Nothing more than connecting it to have the printer working. It can also be connected to a wireless router and although the manual says that an ethernet connection is needed in order to establish a link with a computer, the printer may also be easily installed wiressly. A few users had little troubles with the printer’s ip settings as it is not clear if it uses a pre-built default address or grabs one from the DHCP. Neither the manual nor the web page gives information about this.

If you don’t want to install the whole software provided with the printer, you can go to the printer’s official web page and download the HP 6940 driver only.

Pros:

• Reasonable cost.
• Good printing quality, excellent graphics and photo quality, very fast.
• Good-quality draft printing.
• Rarely jams (even with re-used paper)
• Works from Windows XP/Vista/Windows 7, Mac OS X and Ubuntu Linux.