HP Photosmart 3310 All-in-One Review

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Three Fabulous Features Undercut By a Fourth

The HP Photosmart 3310 is almost the greatest multifunction peripheral we've ever seen.

We were practically grinning during our first hours with the color inkjet printer/copier/scanner/fax, enjoying its straightforward control panel and almost startlingly above-average print quality -- whether making a routine copy of a color page or shrinking it to a razor-sharp 4 by 6-inch glossy. And when we inserted a strip of old 35mm negatives and got borderless color print positives, we were like, "Whee! Look at us, we're a photo lab!" Seriously, it was way cool.

Then we considered the Photosmart's $400 price -- not outrageous, but likely to give shoppers pause in this age of impressively affordable all-in-ones (such as HP's new Officejet 5610, priced at $150). Then we caught ourselves grumbling, "What's up with this skinny slot of an input tray? Printing only 100 sheets before running out of paper is OK for family projects, but not for small-office workers."

Then came the deal-breaker: It might be fine in the printer/scanner/copier category, but any multifunction that adds the fourth feature -- faxing -- is crippled without an automatic document feeder that saves you from having to open and close the lid and place and remove pages from the scanner glass one sheet at a time. Fax machines need sheet feeders because faxes have at least two pages, the content and a cover sheet, and a feeder is essential for optical character recognition (OCR) scanning of multipage documents too.

In other words, we discovered that the 3310 is exactly what HP says it is -- a multifunction with the emphasis on photo printing, positioned on the home/hobby side of the consumer/office divide. There's no shame in that, but there's also a good argument for its Photosmart 3210 sibling, which offers the same great hardware and software minus fax and wireless networking (and, to pick nits, a 2.5- instead of 3.6-inch front-panel LCD) for $100 less.

Branding Run Amok

To be fair, HP is ready to court small-office shoppers as well as digital photo fans; the company's Web site has separate "All-in-ones for your home" and "for your home office" pages, and $400 on the latter will buy you HP's Officejet 7310, which offers both a fax with document feeder and double-sided printing. (We reviewed the similar model 7410 last November.)

Still, we don't envy the consumer trying to make sense of HP's inkjet printing brands -- there's PSC, Photosmart, Officejet, Officejet Pro, Deskjet, and Business Inkjet, even before you get to the model numbers.

To get back to the Photosmart 3310, its photo-printing aptitude is obvious when you open its top cover. Instead of Officejets' black and tricolor ink cartridges, or black and tricolor with the former replaceable by a photo cartridge for six-color printing, the 3310 has six separate ink cartridges: a large black tank plus smaller yellow, cyan, light cyan, magenta, and light magenta modules.

Compared to tricolor ink tanks, HP's half dozen make for more economical replacements as various print jobs drain one color faster than another. A new black cartridge costs $18, with the five colors $10 apiece. HP offers a bundle of all six with 150 sheets of 4 by 6-inch photo paper for $36, boasting that the combo pack reduces cost to a drugstore-beating 24 cents per print.

If you're printing letters and reports instead of photos, HP says a set of ink cartridges will last for 300 to 400 pages, which seems to fit with what we observed from our test unit's on-screen ink gauges (seen on both the front-panel LCD and the PC monitor at the start of each print job).

If you're still doubting the 3310's predilection for photos, the 100-sheet main paper tray is beneath -- a little squished beneath, as we said -- a second, 20-sheet tray especially for 4 by 6-inch photo paper, so switching from general to imaging work is a cinch. A snap-on automatic duplexer is an $80 option.

The Photosmart also matches dedicated photo printers by providing four slots for cameras' flash-memory cards (CompactFlash, Secure Digital/MultiMedia Card, xD-Picture, and Memory Stick/Pro), as well as a PictBridge USB port for loading images and videos directly from a camera. You can select images or video frames for printing by creating a proof sheet of thumbnail images, then running it through the scanner after marking your desired images and page layout; by using the front-panel LCD and control buttons; or with HP's supplied Image Zone software.

Skip To Page • 1 Three Fabulous Features Undercut By a Fourth 2 Spectacular Printing, Even With Pauses

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