Rating: 
Summary: Pleasantly Surprized
Review: I was worried about investing money in a printer that I ordered offline, but I was amazed at how fast it was delivered, and I havent stopped printing my pictures out since I got it. It has wonderful quality and beautiful pictures. I'm amazed. I highly recommend the product.
Rating: 
Summary: Good--Not Great
Review: It's supposed to turn on autmoatically. It generally does not. Often it needs a sheet of paper ejected before it will do the print job. Though it's not slow, it does NOT print B&W pages at 17PPM. I can't see how they rated it that fast. The copies are clear in any event. And it's [inexpensive].
Rating:
Summary: Great all around printer for the money
Review: Some reviewers have complained about the HP 5550 spending 5 minutes whirring around and not printing. It does that the first time you put ink cartridges in to calibrate itself, after that it is very fast with no lag. For me, this replaces a Deskwriter 540, and it is infinitely better. It has two ink cartridges, black and 3-color for regular printing, and a photo cartridge that replaces the black one for printing photos.
Printing photos, even with just the regular 3 color ink on plain paper was outstanding. Not photo album quality, but great for pix of the kids and the like. I haven't tried the photo ink and paper, but I dont plan to. If I want pictures I'll get a photo lab to do it cheaper and better.
Good included software (on the Mac anyway) that tells you your ink level and sets printer sleep mode. The main annoyances are the lack of an included USB cable, and the enormous power plug "brick" takes up too much space on the power strip. Otherwise it's a good deal for the money, and I plan on keeping it as our main home printer.
Rating: 
Summary: No more HP printers for me ever!
Review: This is my last HP printer.
I always hope they would improve but their products seem more like a marketing ploy to sell ink cartridges and paper.
First of all the quality is mediocre at best. It is also annoying. The silly thing goes spastic for 5 minutes every time you turn it on, ratcheting back and forth doing God knows what.
To keep a halway acceptable print quality you must clean and calibrate often. I have a 3 year old Epson that I calibrated once and it still prints better than the DJ5550.
It is also very refill unfriendly.
I refill and basically think the ink quality of the kits is better than the ink shiped with HP's hideously expensive cartridges. The printer remembers your cartridge and when it thinks it should be empty it will nag and pause printing, the spit out your expensive photo paper and start printing on the next sheet.
This is a terrible printer to use, even with a new cartridge the quality will eventually degrade for whatever reason.
Compared to my Epson I get fewer pages per $ of ink and the Epson makes a much better photo printout.
Stay away from this printer, and probably most of HP's overpriced junk.
I gto a free Lexmark with my Dell order that is better printer than this HP.
Rating: 
Summary: Nice printer...typical HP strategy...
Review: While the reviews as far as print quality are right-on, I find it criminal that HP continues to place us on a "subscription" service for their inkjet cartridges. You void a warranty if you use refilled cartridges and you wind up paying about twenty nine a month on typical printing volumes. Thus you get a great quality printer, and you then spend a ton by being hooked on black inkjet carts...oh, HP recently lowered the amount of ink so you'd run out quicker...then they raised the rate. I just bought Laser (Lexmark) and am NEVER going back to HP until the Justice Departement makes them print cartrdige refill rate pricing based on typical duty cycles.
Rating:
Summary: Fantastic Value - Great Family Printer
Review: I bought this because my last printer died. My last was a HP 895cxi. The 895cxi was a fantastic printer (even today), I find the 5550 to be twice as good, and I paid one third of what I paid for my 895cxi.
For the price of printers now day they are disposable - if they break , buy a new one - it is not worth the price to get one fixed.
The 5550 is a fantastic printer, and this price is great.
The printer has 4 modes of print quality in which each uses a lower dots per inch setting, lowering the ink used and printing more pages per minute. I love the lowest setting for all around use. The print is a bit light but very acceptable. This is a good feature for many reasons. Look at the price of printers and compare the price to replace cartriges (more than 50% of the cost of the printer) - buy the way my 895cxi needed new cartridges before it died, and I spent $20 - $25 more for this 5550 printer than to replace the cartidges on my old printer.
Next value - my 6 year old daughter is a computer power user and she loves to print. Paper is cheap, and on the economy setting on my 895cxi we could go over a year on a set of ink cartridges. the 5550 is even more economical.
Next, photo quality. If you need for anything, you just up the print quality. There are four settings and even the second setting is right for business and school work. With my 895 I could print 8x10 prints on ink jet paper, put in a glass frame and it looked like a photo. The resolution on the 5550 is even better. Plus you can replace the black cartridge with a photo color cartridge for even better quality - look out Photomax.
This printer is the complete package. The paper is front loaded so the printer fits in tighter areas or is good on top. The price tells me that the printer will soon be discontinued so you may want to buy soon.
Rating:
Summary: Best printer I have used.
Review: This will be my 3rd printer since I got my first computer in summer of '96. It is the best one I have had (if I make cards I want the color on the cards to look like they do on the computer...this is the first printer that does that.)
My husband takes a lot of landscape as well as sunset/sunrise photo's with our dig. camera and likes to print and frame them. With the photo print cartridge you can buy, they come out looking just like they did in life. Great!
It is very easy to fix a paper jam and it is the easyest printer I have ever changed the ink with. It is VERY simple. I love this printer!
Rating:
Summary: SLEEK---FAST----QUALITY FRESH PHOTOS
Review: I HAVE HAD THIS PRINTER SINCE JAN.25,03. SO FAR I LOVE IT. ITS A LITTLE HARD ON INK, BUT THE SPEED AND PHOTO QUALITY MAKES UP THE DIFFERENCE.
Rating:
Summary: Speedy and sharp
Review: I was amazed at really how fast this printer actually performed under demand. I was rushed to do a big job of many photos for work, my old 820C was on its last leg. I needed something reliable and fast. I ordered the HP DJ 5550C and was able to pick it up from Office Depot within 2 hours. Once home it worked literally within 10 minutes and I was able to print the entire project on target and under budget. The color is amazing even on heavy card stock! My client asked me several times what printer I used for this job. They would not believe me when I said it was this $... HP DJ 5550. HP saved my [bacon]!
Rating:
Summary: Paper due in an hour, but I found time to write this
Review: Well, I recently bought the DeskJet 5550 and maybe I am the only one that has had a bad expierence with this thing. After reading the other reviews it seems like most of them are overwhelmingly positive. However, since day one this printer likes paper jams more than it does actually printing. The only thing I can do with it is print one page, then guess what... that's right it gets a paper jam. I have a 15 page term paper due in an hour, yet I am so frustrated that I thought it was more important to write this little review than to go to the library to print out my paper. If you are thinking about buying one of these things you are more than welcome to mine, if you can put it back together. It is in peices in my dumpster outside and it's only a month old....what a waste of money. But like I said maybe it's just the one I got, but after that peice of junk I will never buy an HP printer again.
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