Product Reviews

Life used to be so simple. If you handed over a large wedge of cash you would get a nice, basic laser printer. Now, let's take a look at the HP Laserjet 3390. For the sum of £470 what do you get? A high-speed 1200dpi mono laser printer, which is also a scanner, a duplex-capable A4 photocopier with document feeder, and a fully-featured fax machine. Oh, and it's all networkable. No, things certainly aren't what they used to be.

We put the HP Laserjet 3390 through its paces to see how well it performed and how it fitted into a general office environment. (There's also the Laserjet 3392, which comes with 128MB of RAM rather than 64MB and a 500-sheet paper tray rather than a 250-sheet one, for a slightly more expensive £586.)

The HP Laserjet 3390 is a fairly compact device, especially considering what it provides. This space-efficient form factor is achieved by building the scanner unit, which drives the photocopying and fax imaging features as well, above the main body of the printer on two solid pillars. The controls are all together on one wide and unarguably daunting control panel, which runs the entire width of the printer. Fortunately, it isn't actually that hard to use in practise. Day-to-day faxing is dealt with on the left, copying on the right, and device setup and printer configuring is handled in the middle with a few core buttons and the ubiquitous LCD panel.

The paper tray has a small but visible paper level indicator, and there's a manual feed slot just above it. This is clearly a 'single sheet at a time' manual feed mechanism; there's no tray at all, just a slot with adjustable width guides.

The installed HP Director software gives one-button access to some of the printer's features from your Mac; scanning, emailing and faxing, plus

ADVERTISEMENT

access to the fax log, device maintenance controls and the user's guide. We found the scanner software to be workable but not without flaws. It doesn't try to offer too much; you're given four presets - Text, Photo, Mixed (Color) and Mixed (Greyscale) - plus 'Custom' which lets you pick between colour, greyscale and black and white and choose resolutions from a short list. Its network-accessible operation was of definite interest, but it did misbehave in our labs tests when used by two different machines on our network. The bottom line is that the scanning works and it can be used over a network, but it isn't a strong point of the HP Laserjet 3390 and you may have trouble switching control between different Macs.

The fax features were rather more impressive. The setup software is able to handle all reasonable fax/phone setup requirements that might be encountered. Using it as a fax printer from your Mac is simple, as it works with the OS as a fax modem. As a standalone fax machine you just use the scanner bed for your originals, or use the document feeder for multiple pages. And of course it performs as a normal plain-paper fax machine for incoming faxes.

The HP Director's Email button just makes a scan without user input and turns it into an image attachment in an outgoing email message. It works with Mail by default, although you can set it up to talk to different email clients. Some may find this hand-holding to be a bit over-the-top, but it is unarguably convenient and well implemented.

As a regular printer it performed well. It proved to be pretty swift for general office work; 38 seconds in total for a ten-page word-processed document is fast enough for most people. It wasn't a slouch with graphic work, although it would benefit from additional memory if this is your main requirement. Installing extra RAM is as easy as we've seen in any printer; a door on the left comes off to reveal an easily accessible RAM slot.

OK, it is true you can get a fast mono laser printer, even a networked one, for a fair bit less than the asking price for this product, but the total package that you get with the HP Laserjet 3390 is good value and well designed. If you really just need a single-function laser printer look elsewhere, but if you want to kit out a small office with a networked printer, scanner and fax this is an impressive package.