HP Photosmart 5510 review

An all-in-one needn’t be perfect: a low price and adequate quality will suffice for many. Step forward the remarkable HP Photosmart 5510, which manages to retain a good deal of what’s right about the rest of the Photosmart range, but in a device that costs a mere £50.

To hit that low price, HP has stripped it of extras, so there’s no duplex module, the input and output trays hold only 80 and 15 sheets respectively, and its big tablet-style interface looks a bit odd with a tiny 2.4in screen in the middle of it. But that doesn’t mean this is a low-end device. It’s a touchscreen, albeit with a rather cramped menu system, and you get Wi-Fi to go with the standard USB connection. It’s also compact and rather stylish, with its matte finish and rounded pebble shape, which we don’t generally expect for this kind of money.

The 5510 uses four inks, and it will accept the XL variety to reduce A4 page costs to a reasonable 2.2p for mono and 6.6p for colour. A 6 x 4in photo costs a middling 19.1p.

But it isn’t quite the same print engine as the dearer Photosmarts: HP makes far lower claims for its speed than with the 7510, and our measured output rates of 10.5ppm for mono and 5ppm for colour bear that out. Where it loses further ground is in the scan tests, with the 5510 taking 26 seconds for an A4 300ppi capture and 43 seconds for a 6 x 4in capture at 600ppi – that's slow by any standards.

The quality holds up to the budget cuts far better than the pace, with photos looking almost identical to the dearer 7510. Text is the one print test where the 5510 falters, but a bit of minor spidering isn’t a disaster. More importantly, its scans meet HP’s usual high standards, beating far dearer devices for sharpness, colour tone and quality. It's a superb imaging device.

It’s tempting to say you should spend more on a higher-end device if you can afford to, but the truth of the matter is that for an awful lot of home users the Photosmart 5510 will be more than good enough. It’s compact and stylish enough for a living room, it’s cheap to buy and not too dear to run, and for the majority of purposes its output is great. At this price it's a steal.

Author: David Bayon