HP DesignJet 5500UVPS

Picture the print room in a busy design or engineering office circa the machine’s heyday: a project is going to a client presentation, and the deliverables aren’t a stack of monochrome bond plots but full-color renderings, coordination exhibits and large-scale graphics that need to look right on coated stock. That is the job the HP Designjet 5500UVPS was built to answer. It is a 60-inch, six-color aqueous inkjet with Adobe PostScript 3 processing built in — a production graphics platform first released in November 2002 and carried in the data through an end-of-life date of January 31, 2010.

Understand it for what it is before anything else: a legacy platform. HP marks this model discontinued, and any purchase or continued operation today is a used-equipment decision, not a current-fleet decision. The specifications below are worth reading precisely because so many of these machines are still bolted to office floors and still turning out work.

Who this machine actually fits

On our spec-derived use-case scoring, the 5500UVPS lands in the middle for general field-office and technical-print duty (52/100) and low for the as-built and archiving loop (22/100). Those numbers tell a coherent story. This was designed as a color-capable production printer for presentation graphics, rendering output, GIS maps and color-coded coordination drawings — the kinds of jobs where a wide gamut on coated media matters more than raw monochrome line throughput.

The as-built weakness is not a defect so much as a scope limitation: this is a printer, not a multifunction device. There is no integrated scanner, so the redline-capture and legacy-drawing-conversion loop that as-built and archive work depends on has to happen on a separate wide-format scanner. If your core need is scanning old sheets, marking them up and reissuing them, pair this with a dedicated scanner or look at a device built around that workflow. As a standalone plotter for color-forward output, it is far better matched.

In practical terms, it suits a design studio or multidisciplinary practice that produces presentation boards and color exhibits alongside routine plotting, or a GIS/mapping group that values PostScript fidelity. It is less appropriate for a firm whose day is dominated by high-volume monochrome bid sets, where a toner or single-pass system would be more economical, and less appropriate as the sole device in a shop that lives on scanning and copying.

What the verified data says

The printing width is a true 60 inches, the widest tier for wide-format work and the reason this machine earns its footprint. HP rates the print speed at 100 sq ft/hr and, in a faster mode, up to 189 sq ft/hr; treat both as manufacturer figures for favorable conditions, not as sustained productive throughput once you account for processing, drying on coated media, roll handling and mixed-size collation. Print resolution is quoted at 1,200 dpi.

The dossier lists internal memory in two configurations — 125 MB and 256 MB — plus a 40 GB internal hard drive. That storage matters for a PostScript workflow: it lets the raster image processor handle complex, image-heavy files without choking, and supports reprint-from-disk behavior. Connectivity is 10/100 Base-TX Ethernet plus an IEEE 1284 parallel interface. The Ethernet is fine for its era but predates gigabit; on a modern network it will be the slow link when you push large color files. The page-description language support is genuinely broad for AEC use: Adobe PDF 1.3, Adobe PostScript 3, TIFF 6.0, JPEG, CALS/G4, HP RTL and HP-GL/2. That combination handles both PDF-based construction documents and native CAD plot streams.

Physically it is a floor machine: 60 in wide, 27 in deep, 50 in tall, and 264 lb. Operating sound is quoted at under 35 dB sound pressure while printing (55 dB sound power), quiet enough for a shared office. Power draw is 400 W operating, 70 W ready and 55 W in sleep, on a 100–240 V supply, and it carries Energy Star among a long certification list.

Ink and media economics

The 5500UVPS uses HP’s six-color aqueous ink system with separate cartridges and user-replaceable printheads — the same ink platform shared across a dozen machines including the DesignJet 5000 UV, 5000ps and the 5500 MFP family. The separated cartridge-and-printhead architecture is a real operational advantage: you replace only the color that runs out, and printheads are serviceable items rather than part of the cartridge, which historically kept per-print ink cost reasonable for the volume this class was built to handle. Our scoring reflects that with a strong ink-economy read (80/100).

The practical caveat for any buyer today is supply, not design. Because this is a discontinued platform, the meaningful question is whether fresh, in-date ink, printheads and maintenance parts are still available for it — a point to confirm before committing, since aqueous inks and printheads degrade with age. Media handling is roll-fed for production runs with sheet capability; we don’t have verified roll-capacity or automatic-switching figures in the dossier, so confirm those directly if unattended long-run operation is important to you.

How it compares

The nearest cohort is HP’s own 5500 family in the same 60-inch width: the 5500 Printer, the 5500UV and the 5500PS, all now discontinued. The distinctions track the suffixes — the base 5500 and the UV variant differ in ink chemistry and workflow processing, while the PS and UVPS models add the Adobe PostScript 3 engine that makes complex color and PDF work more predictable. If your work is PostScript- and PDF-heavy color, the UVPS positioning is the right one within that family; if you plot mostly HP-GL/2 monochrome, a non-PostScript sibling would have covered you at lower cost when new.

The other named point of reference is the later HP Designjet Z6100 (and Z6100ps) 60-in printers, also discontinued. The Z-series generation moved to a newer ink set and print-pipeline design and is the more modern architecture of the two, so where you have a choice on the used market and can secure consumables, the newer generation is generally the safer long-term bet. This model has no verified successor on file, so there is no direct upgrade lineage to name.

This machine ships only in the 60-inch width, so there is no narrower sibling to weigh against a smaller footprint.

Lifecycle and procurement

Approach this as a used or already-installed asset. With an end-of-life date of January 31, 2010, factory support has long lapsed, so business continuity rests on third-party service coverage, parts availability and consumable supply in your area. Before you rely on one, get written confirmation from a dealer on ink and printhead availability, and a realistic service plan.

What we could not verify

We have no manufacturer-stated monthly duty cycle or recommended volume on file, so don’t infer a sustainable workload from the peak speed figures. Roll capacity, automatic roll switching and finishing/stacking details are not in our verified data. We also have no independent lab testing or field-reliability data specific to this model on file — the reliability read in our scorecard is spec-derived. Confirm all of these locally before buying.