HP Officejet 5510

Despite confusingly similar product names, the Officejet 5510 looks radically different from its older, fax machine-like sibling, the Officejet 5110. The principal difference between the two machines is that the newer product provides a full A4 scanning plate, making it more versatile for general colour copying and scan jobs alike.

The diminutive size of the Officejet 5510 is striking, occupying a mere 453 x 286mm on your desk and rising just 231mm - smaller than many A4 inkjets. Much of this miniaturisation is achieved by keeping paper handling to a minimum. Paper for printing is fed from a lower tray at the front and printouts are delivered in a small 25-sheet tray directly above. The automatic sheet feeder on top of the scanner lid isn't so much a tray as a pair of feeder guides, but it works fine.

Inevitably for such a tiny device, the trays are all a bit flimsy. On a more positive note, you can fold up the input and output trays flush with the unit when not in use, thereby saving even more desk space.

The button pad to the left of the automatic sheet feeder is minimalist in style too, providing just the basics: operation mode, menu navigation (with two-line LCD window) and fax dialling. Operating the Officejet 5510 directly as a standalone colour copier and fax machine is easy. As is common with HP multifunction devices these days, the product comes supplied with masses of software for scanning, photo editing, archiving, OCR and more. It actually takes a good ten to 15 minutes to install it all. Just be warned that HP Director drivers have an annoying habit of popping up error messages on your PC if you leave the Officejet switched off.

In use, the product is unusually quiet - most small printers and scanners are very vocal - and gives more than satisfactory output. It isn't specifically a photo printer but does a good job of it just the same, while text is clear right down to 4pt. It isn't a speed demon, though: while a single A4 black-only spreadsheet took a reasonable 25 seconds to print, 20 copies of the same sheet took nearly five minutes. Colour copying is pretty slow too, at around one-and-a-half minutes for one A4 sheet. The output quality makes the wait worthwhile, but just imagine you had ten pages to copy: it would take a quarter of an hour.

At an optical sampling rate of just 600dpi, however, the scanner is low-end material. It's good enough for copying, OCR and general non-critical image capture, but lab test scans visibly suffer from noise and jaggies. Another disappointment was the supposedly part-automated printhead alignment routine, which prints a test sheet for you to scan back in: the process could only be completed on our sixth attempt to get the Officejet 5510 to recognise that something was on the scanning platter so the process could be completed.

Another disappointment is that HP is catching up Epson for pricing its inks like champagne. The two-cartridge system is handy (one black, one tri-colour) but is expensive for colour output, especially for colour copies where real-world ink usage is often far above the estimated 5 per cent per colour coverage. Sadly, miniaturisation doesn't come cheap.

Author: Alistair Dabbs