I remember this printer well, my father bought one new probably about the time you mentioned. It was great for the time, remember the mixing of the inks to make black, not a great solution but passable.
This brings back memories! I had one just like this when I was a kid it was my first printer. It died on me one day sadly. It was my dad's back in the day then he gave it to me.
The Deskjet 500C used a gearbox operated by the carriage to load and eject paper. A lever connected to the gearbox was shifted by the carriage, selecting the load or eject drive gears. The later Deskjet 520 greatly simplified this mechanism and made it much faster.
I have a video of my 550c in fully functional full color print operation. You can still buy the ink carts and the heads are robust as long as you get a good cart thats not clogged up you can refill and print with them for a few thousand pages before heads start to fail on the carts and for the dried up carts there is a ink desolver solvent that some of the ink re filler companies sell that you can soak them in to free them up and use. My 550c is my most inexpensive means of printing next to my 842c.
Wow, this was my first printer back in 1991! Much better build quality than the cheap garbage that HP churns out these days. I still use a 10+ year old DeskJet 870Cse, but it still isn't as well-made as the old 500-series printers. Get yourself an ink refill kit so you can make a video of it printing something!
I had one myself back in the day. It was bloody good printer basic but reliable and a massive difference from dot matrix I had before. Used to use it with AmiPro Word processor on 3.1.1 and it worked great!
@i386dx That is exactly what I mean! I want to know because it was made so long ago; I was an adult then, too, and I want to be reminded of a time when we in the US still made stuff such as computers, printers, small appliances, etc. Above all, I just wanted to know, and be sure, that the US EVEN MADE inkjet printers, and those such as THE HP DESKJET 500C. Thanks for your concern....that was not expected.
Nice printer! In response to your reply to an old comment saying it would be too expensive to buy an ink cartridge to demonstrate this with, you can buy a genuine HP 25 color cartridge for $5 on eBay.
@ictdude1 No, sorry I don't use this printer anymore (I just can't throw it away), so it would be a bit expensive to buy cartridges only for one video. However; maybe, someday..... you never know ;-)
i have one of these im trying to get to work all the lights are blinking and i want to sell it but i wanna get it to work first. any idea what this thing is worth?
@i386dx That is exactly what I mean! I want to know because it was made so long ago; I was an adult then, too, and I want to be reminded of a time when we in the US still made stuff such as computers, printers, small appliances, etc. Above all, I just wanted to know, and be sure, that the US EVEN MADE inkjet printers, and those such as THE HP DESKJET 500C. Thanks for your concern....that was not expected.
