Hp’s Deskjet line mainly includes HP home printers as well as solutions for small-offices, basically environments with rather low-volume printing needs. The HP Deskjet 6940, a stylish printer belonging to the Deskjet line, will work great with plain paper and plain text. It offers great speed and quality for your usual office document printing. It will print around 36 pages per minute in monochrome and about 27 pages per minute in color.

When confronted with photographs, it won’t do so well. This is highly understandable. Customers who want high quality photo printing should stick to a dedicated photo printer. Once you’ve bought an office printer that offers better printing speeds and networking features, the fair compromise is on the quality of photos. Still, for people who don’t expect the best photo quality, it will be satisfying. Color graphics on normal paper look good as well.

Because it has built-in Ethernet, you can just print from any networked computer. Moreover, you’ll also be able to print straight from your digi cam. So it was mainly designed to give it’s user freedom of choice. Use a PC, or not, print from the same room, or the next, print straight text or photos, it can basically do all of it. It’s one of the most suitable HP home printers.

Like most HP printers, it is pretty easy to set up. Along with the install software you’ll also get the Photosmart Premiere suite of software for photo editing and management. Compared to setting up the printer, installing the Premiere suite takes a bit more time and might be a bit annoying as well. But hey, hopefully you’ll only have to do it once. The HP Deskjet 6940 has a brushed metal design that looks very high quality and rather expensive. In the case of this printer, first impressions deceive, and overall, it can be considered very cost effective. It retails for around $120 (which is dirt cheap for a printer with many features) and it’s running cost isn’t high either. The only case in which you’ll spend a bit more money on the Deskjet 6940 is if you’re planning to print photos on a regular basis.

The 6940 comes with HP’s high-yield black and color cartridges (so full capacity ones) and you won’t need to replace the ink short after you bought the device. According to HP the black cartridge should last for 800 pages while the color will probably need to be replace after about 450 prints.

But it’s important to know that for photo printing it’s recommended to replace the black ink cartridge with another tricolor one or a gray one (for black and white photography). It may sound inconvenient to have to switch ink cartridges, but it’s a pretty simple task. You’ll just have to open the main cover and remove each ink tank. The paper tray works for both input and output of paper and will hold up to 150 sheets. An optional 250 sheet tray is also available on the market if the user feels like paper capacity is an issue. The printer also offers borderless printing.

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