Product Reviews

You might think buying an MFP for the office user would mean choosing a laser printer device, but HP's OfficeJet Pro L7780 is a heavy-duty inkjet MFP. It prints with four ink colours, each available in a standard or high-yield pack. Using the high-yield supplies, this MFP has the lowest print costs we've seen from an inkjet.

The L7780 is the top model in HP's L7000 series, with features such as automatic double-sided printing and an extra 350-sheet paper tray as standard. However, you must fit both options before you start printing, making the physical setup tricky. You also need to fit two print heads and all four ink tanks. The black tank was prone to misalignment and easy to insert the wrong way.

HP's setup software offers a choice of Recommended and Custom installations. It's easy to join wireless networks using the MFP's control panel, but the installer couldn't find the device on our regular wireless network. We tried allowing the software to configure it over a wired connection, then inputting the wireless details ourselves, but had no luck with either. We couldn't establish a reason for the failure, but we had no problems when re-attempting the installation using our second wireless network.

Once configured, the L7780's wireless performance was very reliable, with none of our tests failing. The print speeds in our graph were all timed over a wireless connection. We noticed a few pauses during the printing of our highly graphical Normal test. The 3.8 page-per-minute (ppm) result is almost as fast as we've seen from

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an inkjet, but repeating the test over a USB connection gave a stunning 5.2ppm performance.

Print quality on plain paper was very good, with the L7780's pigment black ink delivering bold and sharp black text. Colour prints were streak-free, too. It's easy to make decent photo prints from a PC or a memory card, though we can't think why most office users would want to.

Prints were acceptably quick over a wireless connection, but scans were less so, with each preview image taking just under three minutes. This slowness was compounded by a frustrating scan interface, which won't let you make multiple scans of a document in the same session and doesn't remember a preview image between sessions. Clicking certain options, such as de-screen, also requires a re-scan without warning. The MFP can scan while servicing incoming print jobs, however, which should help to stop the office grinding to a halt.

The L7780's scanner behaves very differently when connected via USB, with previews taking a more reasonable 10 seconds. The quality of the results is different, too. Scan results were good when scanning wirelessly, but above 600 dots per inch (dpi) scans became blocky, suggesting that the driver was interpolating rather than capturing more detail. Over USB, we saw increased detail up to the 2,400dpi optical maximum, but scans appeared artificially sharpened, even though we had disabled sharpening in the interface.

With a 50-sheet automatic document feeder (ADF), the L7780 can easily make multi-page copies or faxes. For an inkjet, it's a quick copier, with a single-page mono or colour copy taking just 19 seconds. Copying a 10-page original took two minutes and two seconds in black only, and two minutes 25 seconds in colour. The results were much better than most inkjet MFPs, with accurate brightness and colour.

Though it's tricky to set up and its wireless interface isn't ideal for highly graphical scans or printing, the L7780 is flexible and fast, producing good results on a variety of jobs. It's cheaper to buy than an equivalent colour laser MFP, and HP's figures suggest it's also far cheaper to run.