Product Reviews

People used to make fun of multifunction devices for their cheap scans, dodgy print-outs and ridiculous prices. It was only when manufacturers improved the quality and made them cheaper that they began to look attractive again. HP's OfficeJet G55 All-In-One is a case in point.

The concept is a classic: take a colour inkjet printer and build a colour scanner on top. You save desk space, only need one power socket, and connect it to your Mac using one USB cable. Scanning to the printer is handled directly and automatically. The hard-wired link between the scanner and printer functions in one box means you can use it as a standalone colour copier.

The printer hardware is based on HP's mid-range 600dpi x 600dpi DeskJets. Paper is loaded horizontally into a tray at the bottom from the front and print-outs ejected in a tray immediately above it. The output tray incorporates a slit for feeding individual envelopes, and the whole thing can be hinged upwards to help you access the lower tray. The whole top half of the case hinges up partly to let you fit the black and three-colour ink cartridges. This is a bit fiddly because you have to crouch down to see inside, but anyone who owns an inkjet printer will know what to do.

On top is the flatbed scanner, providing an imaging area of 216mm x 279mm (not quite A4) and a lid which can be raised at its hinges to accommodate thick originals, such as books. It captures images at an optical sampling rate of 600dpi x 3600dpi (up to 9600dpi interpolated) and a colour depth of 36 bits.

A large control pad of buttons and an LCD screen sit in front of the device. Apart from the on/off, cancel job and continue buttons, you can safely ignore the others when operating the device from your Mac. But when you want to use the machine as a colour copier, with or without switching on the Mac, you can use the numeric keypad, LCD read-out and quantity controls

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in standalone copier fashion. In fact, it's much quicker to do this, having just put something on the scanning bed, than returning to your Mac to trigger the task from the software.

It's a setup

Having said that, the software drivers are just perfect, as is the entire installation process. HP's attention to setup detail - providing a hardware guide poster and totally automated software installation - is second to none. After your Mac restarts, a floating palette of buttons, called the HP Director, is already configured with the key commands: scan, copy, email and OCR. The palette is designed to disappear when you click on the Desktop or use another program, but can be retrieved at any time from your Mac's Application Switcher.

Drivers are added to the Chooser for OfficeJet Print, a TWAIN-compatible OfficeJet Scan, and OfficeJet Fax. The latter is an odd inclusion since the G55 All-In-One isn't fax-enabled, even though similar multifunction models from HP are. It would certainly have been good to see fax capability here.

In use, the machine is highly effective because it's so easy to use. Scan quality is comparable with any A4 flatbed you might buy for £100 or more, and the print quality is very good, with smooth images and professional-looking, crisp text, even on cheap office paper. You could probably buy a separate scanner and inkjet printer for £20 less, but you'd lose a heck of a lot of functionality.

It's a shame the scanner can't be upgraded with an automated document feeder, since HP has had the foresight to let you upgrade the printer with an optional two-sided (duplex) printing module, which fits on the back, just like any modern DeskJet. To be honest, print speed is painfully slow, even with single-sided output. Printing out three graphically unintensive pages from HP's own Web site took more than five minutes in our tests. But the machine handles queuing well, so you can scan while you print and don't have to wait for one copy job to complete before starting the next.

We were underwhelmed by multifunction devices in the past, but HP's OfficeJet G55 All-In-One has changed our view. It's the first machine we've seen of its kind that wouldn't be a turkey in a real office. In a small business where space is tight and quality and flexibility outweigh speed, this could be a genuinely satisfying buy.

NEEDS Mac with USB, Mac OS 8.6, 165Mb hard disk space plus 50Mb for full-colour scanning

HELP One year return-to-base warranty