Cool features make the 9130 Color All-In-One OfficeJet the only printer your office will ever need
Is any inkjet color printer worth $1,000? What if it includes a scanner, copier and fax machine? When HP asks $999 for its 9130, is it genius or goofy? After living with the 9130 for a few weeks, I vote “genius.”
The HP 9130 Printer/Scanner/Copier/Fax system is the inkjet sibling of the 3380 LaserJet all-in-one I tested before the holidays. It also includes a memory card reader handling six types of digital camera memory media.
Printed pages appear quickly, even when the printer has to warm up from standby. Both color and black and white pages shoot out at 20 pages per minute. I’ll throw in some extra coins for high performance.
Network support comes from the built-in print server. Everything can be done over the network, unlike the 3380’s scan functions that required a USB tether to a PC. Using the auto sheet feed function on the scanner, I can stack a dozen pages on the printer and have the scans waiting on a network drive before I refill a coffee cup. Six speed dial-buttons can be configured for different network drives, although scans only go to the root of each shared drive. This is a big improvement in network support over the 3380 and worth some extra coins.
Digital camera fans will love the photo functions. Plug in a memory card, hit a couple of buttons, and pages with photo thumbnails appear. Check off the pictures you want, along with the size and the number of copies, and stick the page back on the scanner. Three more button pushes and photos start spitting out. Worth some extra coins, but you can get those features on cheaper HP printers, too.
Remember last time I said printers are morphing into computers with paper trays? There are three models in the 9100 series: the 9110 ($599), the 9120 ($899) and the 9130 ($999), which I tested. The 9130 includes a keyboard. Yes, a keyboard, handy for initial configuration and faxing. More coins allowed, for the cool factor if nothing else.
Two-sided copies take more time but save money on paper. Watching the 9130 print one side, wait for the ink to dry, then suck the page back into the printer and reverse it is high entertainment, and absolutely worth some more coins.
Color printout resolution with software enhancement goes up to 4,800×1,200 DPI and looks great on plain paper and fabulous on photo paper. But even $50 inkjets print great today, so I’m hard-pressed to shell out more for that.
The ability to connect to the scanner over the network using standard drivers built into any imaging application is handy, although you must walk to the printer to place the image on the legal page-sized flatbed scanner. This alone doesn’t earn many coins, but the fact that every function is network-enabled does.
Ability to e-mail a scan directly from the printer? Coins. HP PCL 5 and PCL 6 (Printer Control Language) along with PostScript included? Coins. Pricing for black and three color cartridges at $34, well in the reasonable range for about 1,750 copies each, is a wash. Quiet operation and power-saving modes? Coins. Flexible copier options, including two-sided and a button for color or black and white? More coins.
Worth $1,000? That’s a lot of money. But if I had to provide seven people with decent color printers sporting loads of features and a scanner, I would get one 9130 instead. You’re even better off bypassing four of HP’s own $199 units to get one 9130.
