HP All-In-One a Good Home Office performer

by Johnny Bray

Being a part-time electronics salesman, I’ve experienced first hand how hard it is for many people to decide on the right printer (many spend more time worrying about pages-per-minute than the square feet of the house they’re thinking of buying).

To make things slightly less difficult, I can tell you that Hewlett Packard’s Officejet 6110 All-in-One printer is a very nice little unit. It has all the features you’d want from an all-in-one (printer, fax, copier, scanner), but there are some extra bells and whistles that make it that much more impressive.

And don't worry about pages per minute: in the real world it's rare for the stated specs to be achieved anyway, since they reflect "best case scenarios." Naturally, we'll give you those specs, but for comparison purposes.

In what will hopefully become more common with all-in-ones, the 6110 has an automatic document feeder, allowing you to scan, fax, or copy up to 35 pages without having to babysit the machine. This is a very handy feature if you’re running off your feet at work or are just extremely lazy (and we know who we are).

Moving on to the specs, the 6110 is capable of printing (in draft quality) up to 19 ppm in black, or 15 in color, making it slightly faster than the average printer on the market. It is also fairly quiet, which is sometimes an important feature for new parents - or people who yak on the phone while in the vicinity of the printer. Or people who just want their office equipment, like their kids, to be seen and not heard.

In terms of resolution, the HP manages 1200 X 1200 dpi in black or in color, but can reach 4800 optimized dpi on “HP Premium Photo Paper” (though it could probably get pretty close using someone else’s photo paper instead!).

When it comes to faxing, the 6110 can fax at 6 seconds per page at 300 X 300 dpi, and is capable of storing 75 speed dial phone numbers.

Moving on to scanning, this seems to be where the Officejet shines. It is a color flatbed scanner, maxing out at 9600 X 9600 dpi (depending on computer space and other system factors) and reaching 48-bit color depth. Unfortunately, as is common with readily available all-in-ones, it is incapable of scanning or copying legal size documents (its maximum size is 8.5 X 11.7 inches), which is fine if you never have to scan or copy legal size documents.

But if you do…

The color copy resolution reaches 1200 X 1200 dpi, again on “HP Premium Photo Paper,” but only 1200 X 600 dpi in black. It will make up to 19 copies per minute, and can be reduced or enlarged to 25-400% of the original size (the copy, not the printer itself).

If printing photos is important to you, you can probably do better. The Officejet definitely has great overall quality, but the color seems ever so slightly dull. By no means is it anything to cry about, but for such a seemingly higher-end machine, it’s a little surprising. Especially when you take into account that Epson’s C62 printer has such incredible photo print quality for less than half the price (okay, granted it’s not an all-in-one, and that's undoubtedly the difference here: you want all in one convenience, you generally pay in other areas, though you don't pay seriously).

The 6110 has a 100-sheet input tray, a 50-sheet output tray, 35 page ADF, and an optional two-sided printing/copy accessory. It’s Mac compatible, but check the box closely, because from what I’ve experienced at work, it may not be compatible with all HP computers (which I’m still trying to figure out).

As long as you’re running anything from Windows 98 through XP, have 64 MB of RAM, 650 MB of free hard drive space and a CD-Rom drive, you should be okay, though an 800 X 600 SVGA monitor, a sound card, and internet access are all recommended as well.

More printers these days are using individual color cartridges (four in total: black, cyan, magenta, yellow), but the 6110 only has two, one black and one tri-color. It can be more expensive this way, since you must replace the tri-color if any one of the three runs out, rather than just replacing them individually.

But seeing as how that, the not-quite-perfect photos, and the lack of legal sized document scanning are my only complaints about this otherwise impressive printer, I’d say it’s one of the better all-in-one units currently on the market.

Despite my complaints, however, and its comparatively big size, if I really needed a new printer, I’d be very likely to look in the direction of the HP Officejet 6110 All-in-One. Sure it has compromises, but it seems to have balanced them very well.

Johnny Bray is a consumer electronics sales consultant and publishes "Screen D'or Magazine."

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