Printer, fax, copier, scanner. All in one. Too good to be true? No, but it's not all roses.

If you've used a fax or printer before, there will be nothing new about operating this machine. None of its features are really all that new or amazing. That said, I must say it is has an air of user-friendliness that seems to embody most HP products.

So why would you buy it? If you want a b&w laser that can fax, copy, scan all in one relatively small footprint. If you want a multi-function product that's easy to use and if the price seems right. Lasers prove cheaper to run than inkjets in the long run.

Features I like: the ability to scan, fax, copy multiple pages with the slide of a lever and the press of a button. Speedy printing, speedy faxing, speedy copying when only copying text. The ability of manual feed sheets of paper which overrides the automatic feed.

Why you wouldn't buy it? Annoying idiosyncrasies start to emerge.

After 2-3 years of use have not experienced a lot of paper jams, maybe one every few months, but when they happen your blood will boil. Problems escalate after 6 months of use.

When scanning and copying, the paper is often fed into the machine askew, resulting in copied pages and scanned items coming out at angles rather than nice and straight.

While scanning text is a very fast affair, scanning images at high resolutions, do so just before going on a holiday, a long holiday. The speed, or extreme lack of it, is definitely something to be seen to be believed. This non-desire for haste, though somewhat alleviated by setting the port to ECP mode in your BIOS setup, is something that has befuddled me as it only scans in B&W(!), another shortcoming.

When printing, there are times the paper comes out warm and slightly curled, and as the page cools down, the curling becomes so pronounced as to become extremely irritating. It really makes the printed product an ugly thing to look at, hold and especially makes it irritating to read.

One other thing that may or may not be desirable, is the machines need to print out status reports after every problem, no matter how minor. I personally would have liked an option popping up asking me whether or not I wanted an error or status report printed out. Many a tree have perished so that I may be told problems immediately obvious.

Recommended: No

Amount Paid (US$): 520
Operating System: Windows