The good news about the £79 HP Photosmart 5510 e-All-in-One colour inkjet multifunction printer (copy/print/scan) is that it looks great in a small or home office, produces very good output, and is exceptionally easy to set up and use. The bad news is that HP has paired it with a feature-deprived driver that doesn't even help with manual duplexing. As James Coburn said to Mel Gibson in the movie Payback, "That's just plain mean." Not to mention environmentally irresponsible.
The HP Photosmart 5510 is like its cousins - the HP Photosmart 6510 e-All-in-One and the HP Photosmart 7510 e-All-in-One - in that it provides a colour LCD touchscreen with contextually lit buttons that you use to control the machine's functions. The touchscreen gives the printer a very modern look and makes it very easy to use. See also: Group test: what's the best multifunction printer?
Paper handling is rudimentary: A flip-out front panel reveals an open bay with an 80-sheet input area. Output falls into the same space, with a cleverly designed catch that swivels outward. There's no automatic duplexing, and there's no automatic document feeder (ADF) to go with the A4/letter-size scanner. The scanner lid doesn't telescope to accommodate thicker items such as books.
HP omitted a number of software features from the Photosmart 5510's driver. You can print and scan, but you can't specify layout options such as booklet, poster, or multiple reduced-size pages on a single sheet. Worst of all, this MFP doesn't support manual duplex printing. One round of printing the odd-page sheets in a batch, turning them over, orienting them correctly, and then printing the even-number sheets - will have most users ruing the day they bought this unit. On the other hand, advanced features such as push scanning (scanning to a PC using the printer’s control panel) and printing via email using HP's ePrint are included. Go figure. You may also print photos from Secure Digital or MultiMediaCard memory cards inserted into a front slot.
The Photosmart 5510 prints normal, single-sided pages quickly. Text pages emerged at 9 pages per minute on the PC and 8.5 ppm on the Mac. Snapshot-size photos printed to plain paper at about 4 ppm and to glossy photo paper at just under 1.9 ppm. Print speeds for full-page photos printed on the Mac were a little slower than average at 0.4 ppm. The Photosmart 5510 produced very fast, and very nice-looking, draft-mode documents. Scans were reasonably fast as well.
The Photosmart 5510's looked good when it arrived, too. Though a tad on the light side, photos had a realistic colour palette on both plain and glossy photo paper. Text looked dark, crisp, and sharp. Scans had a slightly cool temperature and exhibited minor banding issues, but overall they were more than acceptable.
The Photosmart 5510’s replacement ink costs are about average. The standard black cartridge costs £10 and lasts for 250 pages (which works out to 4p per page), while the standard cyan, magenta, and yellow colour cartridges cost £9 each and last for 300 pages (3p per colour per page). The resulting 13p four-colour page is a tad pricier than average. You can lower the colour ink costs by using XL cartridges.
See also: Group test: what's the best printer?
Comments
Lynda said: This printer may have not been expensive to set up but it drinks ink and nine months in service it chews paper constantly what a waste of time
David said: I have had the GP 5510 for just over 9 months now I find it to be extremly slow hesitant when printing from PDF files and absolutely boring when waiting for colour prints - it takes forever plan on making anddrinking a cup of tea and having a chat with someone before the print is completedI have never had such a wasteful printer as far as ink goes - it is costing a fortune to keep replacing the inkl cartridgesI certainly would never recommend this machine to anyone
Niv said: Same problem What to do Mine does not movie to the left its just stuck to the right