The World's Biggest Desktop Printer

By David Em

September 20, 2004

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Inkjet printing has advanced by leaps and bounds over the last three years. Image detail, color range, longevity, and overall cost are now equal or superior to traditional photographic and printing processes.

Photo-quality printers that produce 8 x 10 inch images are available for under a hundred bucks (the manufacturers make their money on the consumables—ink and paper), but creating a nice big two foot-wide print has required a standalone printer such as Epson's $2,995 Stylus 7600. Now HP's taken the next step in price/performance with its $1,895 six-color 24-inch bed 130nr desktop printer.

Assembly

The 130nr is over 41 inches wide, so calling it a desktop unit is a bit of a stretch. But it's technically correct, since we did in fact deploy it on top of a desk. There's just enough room left on the desk's surface for a spare set of inks. It weighs in at about 50 pounds.

Putting this beast together was a trial. It arrived in a huge box. Inside were a bunch of pieces that amounted to a printer-in-a-kit, and a screwdriver. At first, I thought a piece of build-it-yourself Ikea furniture had been delivered by mistake. Unlike Ikea furniture, however, there were no poorly-translated-from-Chinese instructions. Instead, the fifty-step assembly process relies on a language-free poster that consists entirely of icons and arrows.

Perhaps a freshly-minted MBA convinced HP it could save a bundle on multi-language translation costs. If so, its front-end savings come at a considerable cost in time and effort to the end purchaser of the product. It took BYTE.com Associate Editor Dan Spisak and me nearly two hours to assemble the thing. At several points we were on the verge of hysterics trying to figure out what in the world the instruction icons were trying to tell us.

A lot of the 130nr's parts are made of fragile plastic that must be handled very carefully. Eventually we did manage to complete the puzzle. The final product, with its silver and smoked plastic surfaces, looks quite elegant.

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