HP Deskjet 5940 review

Evan Gower October 7, 2009

£59

Price when reviewed

While it may not be part of the Photosmart range, the Deskjet 5940 is yet another solid all-rounder from HP. In fact, HP claims you can print whatever you want with the 5940, and that includes borderless photos up to A4 size.

Getting the 5940 out of the box, we could immediately tell that build quality was a step above just about everything else in the entry-level category. The lid is made from brushed aluminium and the sturdy front-mounted paper trays flip up to leave a minimal footprint when the printer’s not in use. There’s also automatic cartridge alignment and a paper sensor, which detects what type of paper is inserted and can adjust print quality automatically.

The 5940 isn’t the most expensive entry-level printer here, though, costing less than the Epson R240 and Lexmark P915. Admittedly, there’s no TFT or card reader – all you get is a PictBridge port for printing photos directly from a digital camera. At the back is a USB 2 port but, disappointingly, the PSU isn’t integrated, so you’ll have to find a place for the large box.

Almost all of HP’s Vivera cartridges are supported, except the 100 Grey. In the box, there’s a 339 black and a 343 tri-colour for PhotoREt III (HP’s marketing term for the ink system used), but swap the black for a 348 photo cartridge (light cyan, magenta and a photo black) and you’ll step up to PhotoREt IV.

We’re more than familiar with this system, and it was no surprise to see the 5940 produce some excellent photos with the 348 installed. In fact, apart from faint banding (which you can only see from around four inches away), the 5940’s 6 x 4in and A4 photomontage prints were on a par with the Photosmart 8450’s, a printer that costs well over twice as much. That means prints showed realistic skin tones, well-saturated colours and superb levels of detail.

You’ll need to print on Premium Plus photo paper to get the best quality, but it’s easily worth it. We had no complaints with the HP’s mono photo quality either – details weren’t lost in dark areas and no grain was visible.

For text, the Deskjet was average. It printed at 3.5ppm in normal mode and the quality wasn’t a patch on the Canon’s unless you switch back to the 339 cartridge (for its pigmented black ink). Draft speed was excellent, though; at 13ppm it was the third-fastest on test and quality was surprisingly reasonable. A 6 x 4in photo printed in best mode in just under one minute, 30 seconds, while the A4 montage took three-and-a-half minutes.

On the software front, there’s HP Image Zone. This includes a basic photo editor and a printing wizard. The latter is just as efficient as the Canon, Epson and Lexmark offerings for printing borderless photos at various sizes on different types of paper. The driver is simple to use and offers everything bar a print progress indicator – a strange omission. However, we appreciated the Real-life Digital Photography tab, which provides quick fixes for common problems like red-eye, strong backlighting and blurred images.

Running costs are competitive, but notably the Epson R240 works out cheaper. The R240 also boasts the direct printing function, while offering slightly higher quality overall. Nevertheless, the 5940 is a solid choice if you appreciate stylish looks, quick prints and don’t mind paying a little more for your photos.

Running costs

The HP 5940 takes a pair of ink cartridges – either black and colour for everyday printing, or a colour/photo combo for high-quality photos. Between them, the photo and colour cartridges have six colours – the C, M and Y combination in the high-capacity 344 colour cartridge, as well as black, light cyan and light magenta in the 348 photo cartridge.
The drawback to these tri-colour cartridges is that, presuming you mostly print pictures of people, you’ll end up using plenty of light magenta but relatively small amounts of the other colours. This means that, once the light magenta section of the photo cartridge is empty, you’ll have to throw away large quantities of light cyan and black. The same goes for the magenta section of HP’s 344 cartridge.

The plus side to the 5940 is its efficiency. Since new cartridges have brand-new print heads, charging the print head on a new cartridge uses a negligible amount of ink. And over the course of our testing, the 5940 wasted the equivalent of just 11 6 x 4in prints during its self-cleaning cycles. We didn’t need to run a manual cleaning cycle on the 5940 at any point, further reducing the number of pages you lose.

HP’s well-priced paper makes the 5940 an even more attractive proposition, especially compared to the Canon alternative, but Epson’s excellent value pack for the R240 effectively includes free photo paper. Also look out for HP value packs, as these sometimes include ‘customised’ versions of the cartridges that include less ink.

Overall, including paper and a cartridge change, the 5940 costs 39p per 6 x 4in print. Naturally, this price will decrease if you do your photo printing in batches, but it’s a respectable price.