The Hewlett-Packard 5610 is a Nice All-purpose Color Printer for your Home Office

People like a single device that performs several needed tasks, especially when it frees up desk space. Hewlett Packard is one of the most well-known makers of multifunction devices, and the HP 5610 provides you with a dependable all-in-one printer. HP printers are often priced quite low so that you will buy them and then buy their expensive OEM ink . But by buying remanufactured HP ink cartridges , you will save a lot of money over the course of a year.

Like most HP printers, the the HP 5610 excels in print quality, producing sharp details in both text and graphics . Less impressive is the speed of the 5610, which is asseptable for text printing (nearly 8 pages per minute), but becomes quite slow when it comes to printing photos at full resolution (about 0.25 pages per minute). The biggest drawback with the 5610, however, is its poor quality color scanning: color scans contain a blotchiness , with noticeable banding and washed-out colors. Grayscale scans turn out much better and display adequate detail with a good range of gray shading. The officejet 5610 scanner is able to scan up to 1200 x 2400 dp.

The Officejet 5610 includs a 100-sheet input tray in the front. An automatic document feeder (ADF) is also included with a 25 sheet capacity. Standard connection to the PC is via USB. The front buttons make it easy to produce copies with a single button. Other menu items give a range of other less often used features like enlarging, color correction and manual lightening and darkening. THe 5610′s lid does not come off, so if you commonly make copies of larger items that you need to lay flat on the scanner bed, you may want to choose some other copier with a detachable cover.

Hewlett Packard packages the 5610 printer with a standard-size black ink cartridge and a standard tricolor ink cartridge. The $25 photo ink doesn’t come with the printer, but you can easliy order replacement HP 58 photo ink for under $19. The standard-size black inkjet cartridge costs $18, and HP says that it will last 220 pages. That makes printing cost a rather high 8.2 cents per page. After the original ink is gone, you can get a high-capacity black cartridge, good for an estimated 450 pages. The OEM version costs $20, or a more palatable 4.4 cents per page. You can cut that cost way down by purchasing compatible HP Officejet 5610 ink to reduce your per page printing cost to less than 2 cents per page.

In this category the HP Officejet 5610 multifunction printer will give you a nice balance of performance , ease of use , and features at an aggressive price. This printer offers enough features to support a small office with light printing needs, and it’s easy to install and use .