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If you ever needed a reminder of how cheap inkjet printers have become, HP’s Photosmart 5510 MFP provides it. While it doesn’t sit particularly high in HP’s product line up, it has a reasonably well-specified scanner and printer combination, a colour touchscreen, a memory card reader and a wireless network interface for less money than a single tank of petrol. As with other cheap products, we’re always inclined to ask where the hitch is.
Fortunately, there doesn’t initially seem to be one. This is a smart little device that’s perfectly suited to a home office or a student’s bedroom. While it may not look as flash as some of HP’s more expensive MFPs, it has a smaller, more simple touchscreen that doesn’t try to mimic a smartphone’s gesture-based inputs, and is all the better for it.
This is an easy printer to set up, and we found it simple to print directly to it from a smartphone using HP’s Android application and its ePrint service. We’re not particularly keen, however, on HP’s PC setup program, or that its default installation includes Microsoft’s Bing search bar.
While this can be de-selected in the custom setup option, we’re still not very enthusiastic about either the print driver or the scan interface, both of which are essential for using the product.
The print driver appears very basic and, at first glance, should be easy to use, but in practice it’s over-simplified; with common options such as borderless printing hidden away in the unfriendly Advanced Options dialogue. The standard interface lets you select one of three print quality presets, or opt for custom settings – once we’d selected Custom, however, the other three were greyed out, preventing us from changing our mind without quitting the print dialogue altogether.
Like the print driver, the scan interface is very simple. The first step is to select a preset scan type such as Color Document or Photo, then click Scan, after which you’re taken to a preview screen – unless you feel lucky enough to uncheck the option and simply create a scan. Our main criticism of the software is that, while advanced settings are available, they aren’t particularly advanced; there’s no option to turn off the processing that’s automatically applied to images, for example, and you can only select certain resolutions. The resulting image quality was reasonable, aside from the unwelcome evidence of sharpening we’ve seen from many other HP scanners.
The HP scan (top) has excessive sharpening, which leads to an unrealistic image (click to enlarge)
The results from the printer were more positive, with crisp text and quite bold colour graphics on plain paper and decent photographs on coated paper. The only problems of note were some loss of detail in the blue sky of one image, and slightly skewed alignment when using 6×4″ photo paper. Overall this is a good MFP for everyday work, but its software is a frustration – Epson and Canon products are far better in this regard.
