kingzog's Full Review: Hewlett Packard Officejet 5510 All-In-One InkJet P...
Print quality is very good - better than the color lasers at work. It doesn't have the wicking problem that plagued early ink jets where the ink spread into the paper slightly. Once you print something, the paper is dry as soon as it's done. It's done quickly too, only a few seconds for a black and white cover letter. Printing color images is slower but still quick compared to the previous generation of ink jets. It seems to avoid color distortion e.g over/under saturation etc.
Scanning is perfect too - in fact the most impressive thing is that you can do color copies which are indistinguishable from the original, even for documents with fairly subtle images. And you don't even need to turn on the PC to do it.
The reason I bought it was the multi page document feeder for fax and scan, and this works well with no jams, as you'd expect from a HP device.
Best of all, I've owned it for about a year, and the ink cartridge is still the original, and doesn't seem to suffer from the drying problems that made the older ink jets such a pain to use.
I had a HP Desk jet 500C for ages, 10 years in fact and it still works today. I can quite see that I'll keep the 5510 around for just as long.
In fact, it's interesting to compare the 500C and 5510. The 500C was much more expensive - about around three the price of a 5510 today when I bought it 10 years ago. Taking into account inflation, the difference would be vast. It came with some driver disks, and a printed manual with instructions how to install them on Windows 95. I'm a geek so this didn't strike me as being a particularly unfriendly process, but in retrospect it was. With the 5510, there's a poster with a list of six steps, e.g. connect the cable to the PC, connect the phone, turn on the PC, insert the CD. Once you do this, the HP Wizard sets up the drivers and software, and leaves a tray icon for scanning. It asked if I have an answering machine on the same phone line, and worked out that it needed to snoop incoming calls for fax tones for example, so that if I pick up the phone on a fax call, it will still be handled correctly.
It's clearly designed for people who've bought faxes and phones before, but haven't much experience of PC hardware. The scanning software is a bit slow to start when clicking on the tray icon, but it works well. It's also very much designed as an appliance rather than a PC product - you don't need to explicitly save for example, it just happens.
So HP has clearly been working on making stuff easy for non technical users in the last decade, as well as making it cheaper and improving the raw technology for scanning and printing.
Recommended:
Yes
Amount Paid (US$): 149.99 Operating System: Windows
Epinions.com periodically updates pricing and product information from third-party sources, so some information may be slightly out-of-date. You should confirm all information before relying on it.
- Add to My Yahoo!: 
- Add to Google Homepage: 
© 1999-2009 Shopping.com, Inc.