HP Officejet J3680

It may not bear much resemblance to most hulking office printers, but that's the company HP sees the Officejet J3680 keeping. It's tiny compared to most and closer to the dimensions of a cheap standalone inkjet than a multifunction device, but fold out the various trays and flaps and it begins to take on a more imposing profile.

There's no platen, so copies and faxes are fed into the top tray, coming out into the upper of two front trays. And there's a paper tray at the bottom, which also doubles as the output area. Confusing though it may be, it does all fold away if you only want to print - the other trays have convenient holes cut out to leave the two-line LCD visible - but it's tough to look on the design as anything more than basically functional. Ugly wouldn't be an unfair description.

The J3680's selling point is its integrated phone, but the less said about this the better. It feels like a Fisher Price toy and call quality is little better. As this printer is intended for the small home office, only the lightest of phone users will want to use it over a standard desktop model. That cheap feel extends across the whole device, with a flip-up cartridge-bay cover that we almost snapped off, and a menu system that requires you to enter numbers on the keypad to confirm options.

Amazingly, given our awful hands-on impressions, it's not a bad printer. In our technical tests, text quality was excellent, and photos and images weren't any worse than the output we see from most middling printers, while scans proved as good as anything Canon's excellent MX860 can produce – albeit occasionally a little wonky due to the scanning process. You get no preview mode or any fancy options, but at this price we can forgive that.

We can't quite forgive the J3680's painful lack of pace, though. Documents trundle out at 2.4ppm in mono and 1.4ppm in colour, while an A4 photo took nearly six minutes. A simple 300ppi scan took 50 seconds, while normal quality copies came out slower than the vast majority of devices we've tested.

But that's missing the point of the J3680 somewhat. It's certainly not a top quality device, and it looks like something from a nursery school, but if you're very short on space there's no denying it's a cheap way to add perfectly usable copy and fax functions to your office.

Author: David Bayon