Product Reviews

HP's Photosmart 3210 has replaced the Photosmart 2610, which entered our Hotlist after winning a Best Buy award in our last multifunction peripheral (MFP) Labs test in Shopper June 2005. It's designed for photography and other creative uses, and is based on the Photosmart 8250 printer, which itself is currently in our Hotlist below.

The 3210 doesn't have the 2610's fax/modem facility, but it does have an Ethernet port. It's easy to connect to the 3210 via USB or through a home network, where the setup program can automatically find and install it. Frustratingly, however, the minimum installation includes HP's Image Zone Express software and requires a whopping 395MB of disk space.

Scan performance can often be weak on an MFP, but the 3210's scanner has promising specifications that include an optical resolution of 4,800

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dots per inch (dpi). Very few MFPs have the backlight necessary to capture film, but the 3210 can scan up to four 35mm negatives or slides in one batch.

Unfortunately, HP's cumbersome TWAIN interface doesn't make the job very easy. It won't automatically remember settings between sessions, and has no quick thumbnail mode for film previews. The quality of our reflective test scans was fine, but images we captured from film were a little softly focused.

Scanning was swift enough at resolutions of 600dpi or less, but it became tediously slow at higher resolutions. Scanning a 6x4" photograph at 1,200dpi took one minute and 49 seconds, while a single negative took over five minutes at 2,400dpi. The scanner's warm film backlight also managed to curl our test negatives.

Loading the 3210 with A4 paper is a little tricky, but its printer is otherwise hard to fault. It took just 11-and-a-quarter minutes to finish six borderless 6x4" photos at the highest quality setting. Draft text appeared at an impressive 17.9 ppm, although at this speed the pile of printed paper was a little untidy. Print quality was found to bevery high on all our plain and photo paper tests.

The Photosmart 3210 can't send faxes and its scanner isn't fast enough or good enough for advanced creative users. However, it has a standard network port and costs only around £50 more than the Photosmart 8250 printer, so it is great value.