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This article is from September 8, 2006, and is no longer current.

Review: HP DesignJet 130 Large-Format Printer

HP’s DesignJet 130, a 24″-wide, photo-quality inkjet printer, is aimed squarely at the photography and design market. Priced at $1,295 for the base model, the six-color, dye-based DesignJet 130 produces high-quality large-format printing.


The HP DesignJet 130

 
The DesignJet 130 is a little long in the tooth, but its output is good enough to give even new eight-color printers a run for their money, and its price still can’t be beat.
Think Wide
While you might not look at the DesignJet 130 and immediately think “small”, it has a surprisingly economical footprint for a large-format printer. Measuring 41.3″ x 35.4″ x 8.7″ and weighing 48.5 pounds, the DesignJet 130 actually has a smaller footprint than some other printers that print 18″ or 20″ wide. While it’s plainly a very wide machine, it’s relatively shallow depth means you can put it against a wall without making your room an obstacle course. For an extra $60, you can add a roll feeder, which adds an extra three or four inches to the depth of the printer.
For this review, I tested the DesignJet 130nr, which includes the roll feeder and an Ethernet connection, so the printer’s easily networked. The nr version costs $1,895. If you don’t need the networking option, you’ll get the same quality for $1,295, and you can always add the roll feeder for an additional $60.
Setup is fairly simple. The hardest part is lifting the 50-pound machine out of the box! You’ll need to attach the usual power cord and interface cables, as well as load the ink cartridges and printer heads. All DesignJet 130 models include a USB 1.1 port (which will work with USB 2.0 interfaces) and a parallel port.
Out of the box, the printer includes Mac and Windows drivers, a full set of ICC profiles for all of HP’s media, six ink cartridges, and six print heads. The DesignJet 130’s ink cartridges vary in size: large cartridges for light cyan, light magenta, yellow, and black; and smaller cartridges for cyan and magenta. One practical benefit is that you stand a better chance of running the cartridges dry more evenly, saving you lots of trips to the ink store. Installing the print heads and ink cartridges is very easy — both simply snap into place. An ink monitor is always displayed on the DesignJet 130’s front panel LCD screen.
A front-loading tray supports paper sizes from 3″ x 5.6″ up to 18″ x 24″. Alternately, you can feed 4.3″ x 8.1″ to 24.6″ x 63.9″ sheets through a paper path on top of the paper tray. The rear paper path holds thicker media and can be used with or without the roll feeder. With it, you can feed page sizes from 4.3″ x 8.1″ to 24.6″ x 63.9″, or rolls of paper that are 24″ by 50′ long.
All three paper paths are easy to use. When you choose a place for the printer, consider how you’ll usually feed paper and give yourself enough room to access the relevant paper path. The DesignJet 130 also includes a built-in paper cutter that automatically trims roll and sheet paper as needed.
Loading a roll is very simple. Insert it into the roll paper path and the printer senses it and takes it up. I found it easy enough to get the roll re-inserted while standing in front of the printer. So even if you don’t have full access to the back of the printer, you should be able to manage the switch to and from roll paper with little difficulty.
You must unload roll paper before using any other paper paths, though you don’t have to remove the roll from the feeder. To unload a roll, just press two buttons on the front of the printer, which moves the roll back so it’s no longer in the main paper path. The next time you choose to print to the roll, the printer automatically loads it back in. Note that the DesignJet 130 does not have a borderless printing option. Because of its paper handling needs, the smallest margin you can achieve is .25″ on the top and sides and about .5″ on the bottom.
The DesignJet 130 has a built-in fan that runs constantly when the printer is on. The fan is noisy enough that you’ll want to turn the printer off when you’re not using it (which is a more environmentally responsible thing to do, anyway).
The unit I tested needed a firmware update, a free download from the HP Web site. Unfortunately, the update didn’t go as smoothly as the manual said it would, but the HP phone support technician was extremely helpful and solved the problem fairly quickly.
Calibration and Printing Speeds
The DesignJet 130 includes a built-in calibrator that tunes your specific unit for each type of paper that HP provides. This closed-loop calibration system is designed to get the DesignJet 130 printing properly when used with the driver’s built-in color system, and to assure more consistent printing from unit to unit. Every time you change print heads, you must recalibrate the printer for each paper type. This calibration process also ensures better print-to-print consistency over time. Because the printer can calibrate itself, an image you print a year from now will look like an image that you output today.
Calibration is performed through a Web-based interface that tells you which paper types the printer is currently calibrated for. To calibrate the printer, you load in a sheet of appropriate media and start the calibration process. The printer outputs a test pattern and then slurps the test print back in and scans it. When it’s finished, it prints a big check mark on the bottom of the page to indicate that calibration was successful.
The straightforward HP driver dialog box offers full support for the printer’s various quality settings and options. The two most-used options (paper selection, and whether the printer driver should determine colors) are in the same pane, making for quick configuration.
While the DesignJet 130 is aggressively priced, well-appointed, and delivers excellent quality (as you’ll read in a moment), it’s a fairly mid-range performer when it comes to speed. Printing an 8 x 12″ print takes around 4 minutes at regular quality, and 10 at best quality. Before releasing the print, though, the DesignJet 130 holds on to it for an additional three minutes to dry. You can alter the drying time using the print driver, but you’ll probably want to stick with the recommended duration. Printing a 24 x 18″ print averaged about 10 minutes, plus three minutes for drying.
If you switch to Best quality with Maximum detail, your print times will drastically increase: approximately 10 minutes for an 8 x 10″ and half an hour for a 24 x 18″. However, on all the papers I tested, I could find no difference in quality when activating Maximum detail. It does seem to lay down a lot more ink, and take a lot more time, though. You’ll probably want to do a few test prints of your own to see if you think the time and ink is worth the difference in the final print.
For simple photo printing, the DesignJet 130’s speed is not really an issue. If you’re hoping to use it to crank out a high volume of signage or display graphics, you might need to invest in a faster device.
In the three months I used the printer I never once had a clogged print head, or any need for any type of head cleaning cycle. In addition, during that time I was out of town for three weeks, and the printer remained off the whole time. Upon return, it printed fine with no cleaning cycles, and no visible artifacts. In addition to meaning the printer is always ready to print, this reliability adds to the printer’s ink longevity.
Media
HP sells several types of media for the DesignJet 130, including the following:

  • HP Premium Photo Paper Glossy
  • Premium Plus Photo Paper Glossy
  • Proofing Gloss
  • High Gloss Photo Paper
  • Premium Plus Photo Satin
  • Premium Plus Photo Paper Matte
  • Photo Matte
  • Bright White Inkjet Paper.

I was particularly fond of the Premium Plus Photo Satin, a semi-gloss paper with a nice heft, and very attractive finish — and I normally don’t like glossy papers. HP papers are also very reasonably priced. A 50-foot roll of 24-inch wide Photo Satin will cost you about $75.
Rolls are the most economical way to buy paper, but there are some hassles with roll printing. Obviously, paper off of a roll has a curve to it that gets progressively worse as you get to the middle of the roll. You can try to flatten your prints by blocking them. A few days of sitting beneath something big and flat and heavy helps.
The prints are very durable once they’ve dried and can be handled in a reasonable manner. Until then, you need to handle them carefully or they’ll scuff, scratch or, if exposed to water, smear. Even when handled unreasonably, I had a hard time damaging the output after it had dried and stabilized.
I was annoyed by the fact that if you leave a roll of paper loaded in the printer, the first two inches of the roll are useless because the printer’s rollers leave noticeable indentations in the paper. In addition to wasting a few inches of paper, this problem irks me because there’s no easy way to advance the paper past the damaged portion. Now when I print an image after leaving the printer alone for a while, I build in an extra couple of blank inches at the tops of my documents, unless the first thing I print is a throwaway test.
If you can remember to unload a roll when not using the printer, you’ll avoid this problem. I’ve found it to be a difficult discipline to develop.
During my tests, I went through several rolls and many sheets of paper and never had a paper feeding problem. Even more impressively, I have yet to run the initial set of ink cartridges dry. The DesignJet 130 has a reputation for being extremely frugal with ink, and my experience backs that up. You’ll get a great price/print ratio out of this printer.
Quality
I’ll admit to being skeptical when I first started using the DesignJet 130. A six-color printer? In this day and age? Puh-leaze. In addition, my heretofore unknown pigment snobbery presented itself when I realized when I was about to starting printing on a dye-based printer. How quaint.
The disadvantage of a six-color printer is that it lacks the extra inks that are sometimes required to reduce grain, improve neutral tones, boost shadow detail, and extend the color gamut. Additional inks are often used to reduce metamerism, but metamerism is normally only a problem on pigment-based printers.
The grain issue is less of a problem on a large-format printer, as large-format prints are usually viewed from far away. Shadow detail, neutral prints, and gamut expansion are issues at any size, of course.
Much to my surprise, the DesignJet 130 yields excellent output. Colors are bright and pretty, and the printer’s gamut is surprisingly large, reaching well into the reds and greens that are often difficult for a 6-color printer. What’s more, the printer yields excellent continuous tone, even in highlight areas where 6-color printers often shown printer dots, the 130 showed smooth texture and tone. The DesignJet 130’s most noticeable trait is the blackness of the black ink. The DesignJet 130 prints incredibly black blacks, and this gives it a very nice overall contrast range.
Where the DesignJet 130’s six-color engine shows weakness is right where you’d expect it: in gradients and transition zones. When compared to a printer with more inks, the 130 produces gradients that are more posterized and a little more splotchy. It’s most noticeable in areas of dark shadow turning into midtones or highlights. A printer with more inks can create smoother, more continuous gradients in these areas. Still, you have to get within a few feet of the 130’s prints — and you have to be looking for these troubles — to notice such deficiencies, and most large prints are viewed from farther away than a few feet.
The DesignJet 130 also stumbles when it comes to grayscale printing. It’s difficult to produce a truly neutral print, but the unit does a very good job nonetheless. Grayscale prints don’t have a pronounced color cast, they just don’t look as neutral as a truly neutral grayscale image.
I found that I consistently had better results when I let the HP driver control the color, rather than letting Photoshop control the color. Whether using HP’s included profiles or handmade profiles, Photoshop-driven color didn’t look as good as the color generated by the HP Photosmart driver. But Photoshop’s soft proofing still worked well enough, so I could usually get by with one or two small test prints before outputting a full-sized print.
The DesignJet 130’s inks are rated for 82 years without fading or shift. Obviously, I didn’t test them for that long, but after sitting in direct sunlight in my kitchen window for a month, they showed no discernible change. (And it was a rough month, so I thought they’d exhibit some alteration simply from the ambient stress level in the room.)
A bigger problem is having enough pixels to keep the printer adequately fed. Shooting with an 8-megapixel Canon 20D, I could reasonably print up to about 18″ x 24″. Resampling all the way up to 24″ x 36″ produced a fair amount of softness, though the images looked okay from far away. Obviously, this is no fault of the DesignJet 130. Rather, I mention it to show that a 24″-wide printer is probably about as big as you need to go unless you’re shooting with a camera that has a very high pixel count.
Capable, Affordable, BIG
The DesignJet 130 is a great value and a very good printer. Even when you’re accustomed to outputting your images at 11″ x 17″ or 13″ x 19″, poster-sized output is an exciting way to see your work, and the 130 is a capable, affordable way of getting your images big.
 

  • anonymous says:

    I can’t think of anything to add to this fine article. It covers every relevant point anyone who is looking for a wide-format printer is interested in: price, quality, cost to operate, speed. Even issues such as its footprint and noise level are helpful to a potential buyer.

  • anonymous says:

    The only ones I find are $400.00+

  • Anonymous says:

    We purchased the 130 last week and we cannot figure out how to get rid of the lines on the paper. We are printing from Adobe PSE and we clicked the option to allow the HP Driver to determine the color and we cannot get rid of these lines. Ive called tech support and no one seems to have an answer just alot of run around. Can anyone out there help us?

  • Anonymous says:

    there is one problem with this ……..if it is out of warranty and there is a problem with the printer good luck finding some one to fix it ,it will cost you the price of the printer to get it fixed

  • Anonymous says:

    does anyone know whether or not the hp 130 will print on transparencies? i have gotten opposite opinions from the hp support people and after several tries (and continued oppositie answers) i still do not know. i need this printer to print on lg. transparencies — the kind used for overhead projection. any answers? thanks. joanG

  • Anonymous says:

    The quality is fantastic! However, when I upgraded my operating system software I could no longer use the system maintenance or calibration utility. After much work by a HP technician I was told that HP does not support operating systems past OSX 10.3 for the Mac. These days most people use 10.4 and up, I can’t believe that HP hasn’t kept up with Mac users! I have to say that although I have had mine for at least 5 years with great print quality, the fact that I can no longer calibrate or do system maintenance on it makes it worthless – I’m starting to have color shifts that I never had before! If you have a Mac DON’T BUY this until they fix the problem and from what I can tell it has been YEARs since this was first reported!

  • Anonymous says:

    I need a contact number to know how I can order.

  • Anonymous says:

    I noticed in this article that you mention a roll feeder for around $60 more, but I researched this and found only Automatic Roll Feeders for this model and the cheapest one I could find was $499. What happened to the $60 roll feeder? Did they discontinue it?

  • Anonymous says:

    We have 3 such plotters and have not been happy with the roll paper feed. We have found it hard to load paper or rather it will load it then turn back around and spit it back out. Out of the 50 or so users a handful can get it loaded in less than 15 min. most take more time and end up calling support.

  • Anonymous says:

    We have had this printer for a few years and no one that has ever had to use it likes it… they despise it, actually! The paper never seems to be loaded correctly (even when checked against the instructions on how to do so). When the printer finally cooperates, it pulls the paper back and forth over and over again and then cuts it so we end up wasting sooo much paper (and the paper is expensive, too!) We waste more man hours trying to get the printer to work than it is worth. We would definitely NOT recommend this printer to anyone, for any purpose!

  • Anonymous says:

    I think this is very unique article. In this article i found that Calibration and Printing Speeds, media and quantity are very well defined information is available. If you want to read more:

    Printer Reviews

  • Anonymous says:

    Is it possible to print PDFs from Mac? Or can it only handle JPEGs?

  • Anonymous says:

    When I print gray lines in color mode they all come out pink… how can I fix this without turning the printer into black ink only mode?

  • Anonymous says:

    Bonjour,
    I am interested by the same problem.If you had found solutions meanwhile, could you please let me know ?
    Have you launched B&W ICC profiles from hp designjet site ?
    I am also interested to know how you manage the black ink only mode.(good for me for pictorial effects).
    Thanks for your reply.
    Bernard(France)

  • Eric King says:

    I can’t get my 130 to print more than 50″ in sheet or roll feed. Can you give me suggestions? Thanks

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