Product Reviews

HP first introduced the all-in-one printer just over a decade ago and has been refining the combination of printer and scanner ever since, taking it into both the business and home arenas. As the Pro suffix on the OfficeJet Pro L7590 suggests, this is intended for the soho market, although its price may also attract enthusiastic home users.

The design of the OfficeJet Pro, which is decked out in black and cream with a silver control panel running most of its width, is much like any other HP all-in-one device, though bigger than most, thanks to its bulkier print mechanism.

A 50-sheet auto document feeder (ADF) sits on top of the machine and hinges up for access to the flatbed. Paper feeds from a 250-sheet tray at the front and exits onto the tray's cover once you've extended a telescopic paper rest. To the right of the paper tray is a PictBridge socket and four memory card slots, which take all the common types.

The control panel is well laid out, with sections for speed dial, scan, fax, copy and photo printing, including the facility to print a photo proof sheet. In the centre of the panel is a number pad for dialling faxes and a two-line, backlit LCD display, showing status messages and instructions. There's no colour LCD for previewing or selecting photos. At the back is a clip-on duplexing unit, supplied as standard, and sockets for USB and Ethernet networking.

The main difference between the Pro range and cheaper Photosmart all-in-one machines is the ink system. Rather than using the integral-printhead-and-ink-tank approach of other HP inkjets, the Pro has four separate ink cartridges, which plug in behind a cover to the left of the machine's paper tray.

Ink is fed through flexible tubes to the printhead carrier, which contains two clip-in printheads, each supporting two colours. The advantages of this approach, according to HP,

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are higher-capacity ink tanks and faster print times. Setting up the print system requires a one-off ink-charging cycle, which takes about 20 minutes. Software installation is straightforward and the installer loads print and scanner drivers, as well as the simple Photosmart Express front end.

The scanner and ADF work fine and produce finely detailed images, with reasonably accurate colour rendition. This leads to good copy performance, too, with colour copies coming through only a little lighter than the original image.

This is a four-ink all-in-one device and isn't ideal for photo prints. If you want to print 15 x 10cm photos, you have to empty the main paper tray and slide photo blanks well into the machine, as there's no slide-in photo tray or even a multi-purpose feed.

The photo prints it produces are fair, although there's some visible dither and shadowed areas may need software adjustment to reveal detail. Text prints are very good - indeed, they're close to laser quality, with dense well-formed characters in black and colour print. Black text over colour is well registered and white-on-black text is clean, with no noticeable feathering around character edges. The internal resolution of the machine is 1200dpi, which helps.

We have a special word of praise for the device's draft mode print, which for many purposes will be all you need. It saves ink and is marginally quicker than normal mode print. We say marginally quicker, as the OfficeJet Pro is rated at 35 pages per minute (ppm) for black print and 34ppm for colour and these are draft mode figures. However, under test we saw roughly 8ppm for black text and 6ppm for colour, printed in normal mode. Switching to draft mode produced figures of 11ppm and 10ppm, respectively, so still not close to HP's claims. Duplex print is even slower, with our 20-side normal-mode document taking exactly five minutes to complete.

As you climb the scale of printer prices, their running costs usually decrease, and the four-ink cartridges used by this device give costs per page of 0.9p and 3.6p for standard black and colour prints. These are both reasonable figures; the black print cost, in particular, is low for a machine in this class.

Overall, this is a good, soho all-in-one device, with provisos on print speed and noise: the paper feed mechanism produces quite obtrusive sound levels. Even so, the HP OfficeJet Pro L7590 has low running costs and is good value for money.