HP Officejet R65

The burgeoning home and small office market represents huge potential for printer manufacturers, particularly those that produce multifunction devices. You can make some big savings if you're on a tight budget by buying an all-in-one instead of splashing out on separates. Taking over from the OfficeJet 1170C, Hewlett-Packard's OfficeJet R series combines colour printer, copier and scanner, with the R65 on review adding an automatic document feeder to the recipe. Colour resolution has been improved to 600 x 600dpi, while print speed gets a boost, with HP claiming 11ppm for mono and 8.5ppm for colour.

The R65 is a chunky block of grey plastic with a bulky lid over the scanner plate that contains the integral document feeder. A small tray at the front has room for 100 sheets of A4, with a 50-sheet output tray directly above.

The comprehensive control panel across the front is primarily concerned with copier functions and can operate independently of the host PC. You can select up to 100 copies at a time and reduce or enlarge output in one per cent increments from 25 up to 400 per cent of original size. Colour intensity and brightness can be manually modified, and there are masses of copy options to play with. Auto Fit prescans a document to determine where its edges are and will reduce or enlarge an image to fit your choice of paper. A neat poster option uses the highest enlargement setting, works out how to divide the image and creates a picture up to 5 x 5 sheets in size.

We connected the R65 to a Pentium II/266 system running Windows 98 and found installation simple enough. For best scanning speed, the PC's parallel-port mode should be set to ECP rather than bidirectional. The R65 can be shared over a peer-to-peer network but only the printing functions can be accessed by other users. Limited scanning features can be made available, but the printer must be attached to HP's external JetDirect 170X print server. The ink cartridges slot easily into carriers that are accessed by lifting up the front of the printer/scanner unit. A black cartridge costs £22.90 and lasts for 830 A4 sheets, while the tri-colour cartridge costs £24.60 and is good for 360 sheets using five per cent coverage for each colour. Printing costs compare well with the competition, with a text-only page costing 2.8p, while adding five per cent of each colour brings this up to 9.6p.

Print speeds will depend on the mode selected and the type of output. Text-only printing in draft EconoFast mode will deliver 11ppm, Normal gives 9ppm, while Best mode slows to 1.2ppm. Colour speeds drop to 8.5ppm, 2.7ppm and 0.5ppm respectively.

Generally, we found HP's quoted speeds slightly optimistic. Our standard 15-page Word document completed in 110 seconds in EconoFast mode for an average of only 8ppm, dropping to 4.5ppm in Normal mode. Colour prints faired little better, with a 23-page document containing heavy formatting and large graphics taking 305 seconds for only 4.5ppm in EconoFast and 0.7ppm in Best. Copy speeds were also slow, with ten pages taking a full ten minutes to reproduce in Normal mode.

Speed may be below par but output quality is excellent. Using HP's Bright White inkjet paper, we found colour photographic images possessed remarkably high levels of detail with no discernable banding. The CorelDraw train was impressive with super-smooth fills, while the PC Pro colour chart revealed minimal stepping across colour fades with grey shades using equal mixtures of cyan, magenta and yellow faithfully reproduced. Text quality was also impressive, but you can expect to see some feathering when using low-quality paper. Scan quality was good for a multifunction device, with the R65 producing reasonable levels of detail