HP Photosmart 3310 All-in-One Review
Spectacular Printing, Even With PausesOctober 11, 2005
By Eric Grevstad
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Spectacular Printing, Even With Pauses
Like the Photosmart 8250 printer that launched HP's new, high-speed "scalable printing technology" this summer, the 3310 uses the company's new Vivera inks. These promise longer life without fading (longer still in a dark, sealed archive instead of on display in sunlight or artificial light). The printer also has what HP calls an active air management system to reduce the need for periodic printhead cleaning and priming, removing air from the ink and recirculating it for printing. It sounds like a nifty feature, though it repeatedly interrupted the printing of lengthy documents -- including a few of our stopwatch speed tests -- by idling for 10 or 15 seconds while displaying a "Device maintenance occurring, do not interrupt" message on the LCD.
But while it, like every inkjet in history, falls short of its advertised throughput (31 or 32 pages per minute), the Photosmart is no slacker in speed. Using the Fast Draft mode on plain paper, the 3310 whisked through our 20-page Word document (printing the last page first, to finish with page 1 on top) in 85 seconds and our six-page Adobe Acrobat report in 69 seconds. More important, while close study showed a few slightly compressed or skewed lines of text and banding in solid color areas, draft-mode output was much darker and sharper than the grayish stuff we see from most inkjets.
Both the stopwatch and the eye found only minute differences between the so-called Normal and Fast Normal modes, so we mostly stuck with Normal -- and saw exceptional text and virtually no banding even on cheap copier paper. In fact, we'd say the Photosmart 3310's normal-mode output on plain paper is a match for most inkjets' in best-quality mode or on coated inkjet paper or both.
Our one-page business letter with spot-color logo (14 seconds); 20 pages of monochrome Word text (3 minutes and 51 seconds); and six-page (82 seconds) and 55-page (12 minutes and 34 seconds) PDF files all looked good enough to show to a client. They were certainly good enough to make us forget about the slower Best mode (44 seconds for the letter, just over four minutes for the six-page Acrobat document).
And when using decent inkjet paper, the 3310's output is gorgeous enough to shame some color laser printers: We had to squint to see the tiny improvement from Normal (22 seconds) to Best mode (29 seconds) with our one-page letter, or with the six-page PDF (2 minutes and 18 seconds versus 3 minutes and 53 seconds, respectively). The only caution we'd add is that, as in an earlier HP inkjet test, taking a few seconds to specify plain or coated paper worked better than leaving the printer driver in auto-detect mode: The latter produced overly dark or heavy text.
Purely Photogenic
Even in draft mode we couldn't come near HP's claim of as little as 14 seconds to print a 4 by 6 photo (and who wants to print photos in draft mode anyway?), but a little patience yields first-class color prints. Even normal mode on inkjet paper produced an almost frame- rather than thumbtack-worthy 8 by 10 inch image (33 seconds); best mode on photo paper took just over two and a half minutes for a richly colorful, ultra-sharp scene.
Borderless 4 by 6-inch prints on glossy paper averaged about 1 minute and 40 seconds, and looked as good as anything from your local pharmacy's photo counter. So did prints from 35mm negatives, once we lifted the scanner lid and removed its inside cover (to reveal a second, upper light source) and the plastic rack that holds up to six negatives or four slides for placement on the glass.
The 48-bit flatbed scanner offers 4,800 dpi optical resolution and space for up to 8.5 by 12-inch originals; it permits walk-up (PC-free) color or black-and-white copies (up to 50 of them, with 25- to 400-percent zoom). Using the walk-up defaults, five couldn't-tell-them-from-the-original copies of a black and white laser-printed page took 2 minutes and 17 seconds. Five could-only-slightly-tell-them-from-the-original copies of a colorful magazine cover took two and a half minutes.
The 33.6Kbps color fax features a 90-page memory, up to 75 speed-dial numbers, and junk-fax blocking from specified Caller ID numbers, but we're still sulking about the lack of an automatic sheet feeder.
Setting up the 18 by 16 by 9-inch Photosmart is simple, as is connection via either 10/100Mbps Ethernet or USB, with 802.11g WiFi connectivity as a bonus. With a little patience, the front-panel LCD menus and buttons can steer you through simple cropping and rescaling of photos, but you'll do better with HP's driver and the Image Zone program.
The latter offers everything from managing images by date or keyword to handy retouching and layout-picking, whether for straightforward printing or creative projects such as calendars and greeting cards. Using the USB connection to our PC, we also liked how the 3310's help button worked -- push the button, and a message on the LCD tells you that context-sensitive help has just popped up on your PC screen.
All in all, the HP Photosmart 3310 combines superb text and image quality with versatile yet reasonably intuitive and user-friendly scanning and copying. In other words, think of it as an impressive six-color photo printer with a solid bonus copier and scanner on top -- which, as we said, is probably exactly how we'd describe the less expensive Photosmart 3210 model en route to giving it a five-star review. The 3310 aspires to go beyond that to small-office status, but its skimpy paper capacity and feederless fax limit it to four stars.
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