Product Reviews

The Officejet 7130 is one of the newest in HP's all-in-one line-up. It's the only device here to have a built-in automatic duplexer and also features media readers for Memory Stick, CompactFlash, SD and SmartMedia cards.

At a glance, the 7130 looks similar to the 6110, but note the larger footprint. A similar, well-designed control panel lets you scan, fax and copy with ease, and only Lexmark's X125 can rival its 50-sheet ADF. The print engine uses four print heads and two ink tanks: tricolour and black. It all points to more heavy-duty usage than the 6110; indeed, the claimed mono speed of up to 23ppm beats quite a few laser printers.

Unfortunately, we couldn't match this speed in our testing - the 7130 printed our 25-page document at draft quality in 132 seconds, equating to 11.4ppm. However, only the Epson CX5200 bettered this with 12.4ppm, and both

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are still respectable speeds. Printing the A4 photomontage at highest quality took just less than five minutes - only the two Canons were faster.

The 7130 excelled in our print-quality tests, matching or beating the 6110 except for colour performance, where slight banding prevented full marks. In the four-page report, text rivalled laser quality and colour images were vibrant and sharp. Overall copy quality was the best on test, thanks to crisp text and fairly accurate colours, although it failed to pick up the faint grey shading on our test document.

The 7130's only real disappointment was when scanning. It had a tendency to give reds a pink tinge, and this isn't correctable in the editing software HP provides. Other than this, scans were perfectly acceptable.

Mono running costs aren't extortionate at 2.4p per page, but the 7130 uses an under-printing technique where colour is printed below black to make text look darker and sharper. In our tests, almost 30 per cent of the colour ink was used while running the black ink tank down, and so the colour cartridge only printed 354 of the claimed 470 pages, leading to a high page cost of 5.9p.

The optional 400-sheet paper tray is another potentially useful feature, but the extra cost of the duplexer and media readers pushes the price higher than other all-in-ones. As the 6110 offers identical speed and quality, only those who need the extra features should consider the 7130.