Good value for money 3 in 1 printer (HP Photosmart 2575 All-in-One)

Member Name: emmajt81

Product:	HP Photosmart 2575 All-in-One
Date:	14/08/09 (64 review reads)
Rating:

Advantages: Great value, works wirelessly

Disadvantages: A little bit noisy, scans can take a while

I have owned the Photosmart 2575 for a good few years now and whilst I have had a few problems with it, they are nothing that another printer wouldn't also encounter.

This machine has a printer, scanner and photocopyer all in one. HP are a reliable manufacturer which is why I went for this make. You can also set this up to print wirelessly, brilliant if you are upstairs on a laptop and want to print something downstairs without plugging everything in. The wireless use does bring some problems though but only with the scanning. I use Microsoft Office Scanning on my computer and if you're scanning more than one page it sometimes freezes if you close one page after you've scanned and saved it. If you leave everything open til you've finished it seems to work fine. I don't think this printer really has mastered the wireless printing technique but as I have discovered there are ways around the problems!

The photocopying facilities work a treat. You can choose to copy in colour or black and white at the touch of just one button. It probably takes about a minute to photocopy one page (because it uses the scanner to scan it) if the whole page is full of text and/or pictures. The quality is just as aogood as if you were using a full sized photocopier. Great if you need to scan your passport for anything or need to scan a quick letter or statement.

As far as printing is concerned, it's quite a quick printer. Some reviews say it prints 30 pages per minute in black and white but I can tell you right now that is not the case! 5-10 if you're lucky! I don't know where those figures came from. It's an Inkjet printer so it's not all that speedy and it requires cartridges. If you are a home user and don't print masses this is a great printer for you. If you are a business and print a lot it could cost you a lot in ink replacements. Black ink for this machine costs about £20 a cartridge and colour costs a little bit more than that. You are best off buying ink from somewhere like Viking in multipacks of 2 or 3 cartridges as this will save you a considerable amount of money. If you are not printing a lot a cartridge will last you a good few months. If like me you print a fair bit 4-6 weeks is the average use. Once the ink is low a warning will come up on the LCD screen which means you probably have another 20 or so sheets to go before you have to change the cartridge.

The printer itself is a little noisy especially if you have it in your living room. The main noise comes from the paper feeding in when you start printing. There are also memory card slots for printing from memory cards. Without the right paper you won't get good photo quality prints but it's not bad when you use the right stuff. Although if you want a printer primarily for printing photos you're better off wuth a dedicated photo printer like the Epson Picturemate 500 which is cheap but does the job well! For a price of around £60 these days, you can't really sniff at this printer. For a 3 in 1 printer for that price it's really good value for money!

Summary: Good value for money 3 in 1 printer