Usually, I look upon the prospect of reviewing products from Hewlett Packard with a kind of 'blah'. HP printers are normally reliable and do exactly what HP claims they will do. As a result, they are boring to review because they leave little in the way of exciting tales of peripheral woe.
The DeskJet 970Cxi was an exception. It is the first unit from HP that seems to abandon the 'resolution doesn't matter' mantra the company has been feeding us. The 970 provides a maximum resolution of 2,400 by 1,200 dots per inch, arguably greater than Epson, Canon or Lexmark. It is also the first HP inkjet I have seen in quite a while that is Mac compatible.
The DeskJet 970Cxi was also an exception because without question, it is the most frustrating printer review I have ever done. I started out trying to test the 970Cxi with my Macintosh, which is an older PowerPC and does not have the USB port required for Mac compatibly with the 970Cxi. As it looks like I will have to wait a while for my G4, I decided to install a USB expansion card.
The 970Cxi driver installed properly and the printer could be seen by my Mac, but the printer driver and the USB card driver were not talking to each other. Much to my surprise, when I rang HP Singapore's helpline the technicians there too were having problems and were unable to print a complete page from their iMac which has built-in USB.
I decided to give up on the Mac and move to my Windows machine. Unfortunately, every time I tried to run the installer, it froze. To be fair to HP, my Windows machine is used mostly to test printers and there are several drivers already installed. I suspect that another manufacturer's driver interfered with the installation process by seizing the printer port.
With deadline looming, I mounted a two-pronged attack. I borrowed an IBM ThinkPad from our IT department and I asked HP to send me a Mac-compatible print server that I could attach to the 970Cxi. This would allow me to print through my Ethernet rather than the USB port. True to their word, HP had a print server in my hands within hours. Unfortunately it was not a Mac compatible one.