HP OfficeJet 5510 Midlothian VA

Rating: 4/10

HP are curious company. They mix brilliance with pure stupidity and innovation with arrogance. And the Officejet 5510 is all those things in a grey plastic box. For a multifunction machine this is really small, and covers enough area to mount the A4 flatbed scanner. It can copy, scan, fax and print - in both colour and black and white - at resolutions up to 4800 x 1200 dpi. Optical scanning is at 600 x 2400 dpi resolutions in 36 bit colour. So that's good yes? I'd love to say it is, but then I'd be delusional. The 5510 seems to be a machine with not a multiple purpose, but a single one. That is, to help HP's bottom line profitability by selling ink cartridges. That's because it's the most expensive way to print, and the amount of ink in the 5510 compares very badly with HP's business orientated inkjets of the past. I only compare it with them because HP named it an 'OfficeJet', but what does that mean? It means the whole Office can use it, surely? Well to print maybe, if the PC it's connected to is on. Because HP decided that this would be a USB only connected device, and so it can't be fully networked. When you consider the cost of this printer, and what Epson are offering at the same level or price then it really ought to be an 'Office' printer, and not a one-man-office solution. Is there anything else wrong? You'll be delighted to know, plenty.

The drivers don't install cleanly, and then keep on trying to re-install when you least want them too. It's got a very noisy feed mechanism and the input tray is both flimsy and tends to skew A4 sheets. It scratches glossy paper and the output tray is even less robust than the input. There's no flash memory card reader, like all the competition have on their machines, and finally - my personal favourite - access to the print cartridges is so poor you need the hands of a child and the dexterity of a brain surgeon to replace them. Did I miss anything? Well, I could complain about the lack of CD printing, no straight paper path, full resolution printing is painfully slow or a million other things - but I assume these are just part of the whole HP 'experience'. If you are a small business man thinking of buying one of these then ask yourself some questions now. About how much colour printing you need, the amount of scanning you do and why it is that you are actually still sending faxes in the 21st Century. Then tell me you need this machine above a cheap laser printer/copier, a £60 inkjet and a decent broadband account. This product compares very badly with the Epson CX6400 I reviewed recently, and has a street price of £50 more. I'd like to see HP focus on delivering better products rather than on how much ink they can get us to buy after we fork out for one of these.

For more information, visit Micromart.co.uk