My Bargain of the Year (HP PSC 750)

Member Name: upton66

Product:	HP PSC 750
Date:	20/12/02 (4630 review reads)
Rating:

Advantages: Price, Outstanding quality, Simple

Disadvantages: Size

Outstanding value at £99 the HP psc750 all-in-one printer, scanner, copier.

We bought one of these machine eighteen months ago for £199, on special offer at Tesco, I think it was reduced from £249 and we have been delighted with it. When my daughter took it away to university I was left with my original Canon inkjet. So I was delighted to see the same machine in Tesco this month, reduced to £99. It may be heavily discounted to get rid of a job lot, or maybe the model has been superseded, but at this price I couldn’t pass it by. (As a matter of interest that is a third of the price of my old Canon!). It is also being discounted at pcWorld and probably other places.

Whilst I appreciate scanning and display performance depends also on the spec of your pc I reckon hooking it up to my (now old in technological terms) Pll-450Mz pc is a fair test. It is fast on my pc so on a state of the art pc it must be instant and no one could fail to be impressed with it’s performance for the price.

The machine is admittedly bulky and needs to sit beside your desk rather than on it. At 8.5Kg and measuring 27x45x35 hwd and a rather weird curvy shape it isn’t exactly compact. It comes with usb lead that is fairly generous in length and the mains power is provided through a transformer with quite long leads. Remember that turning the power off on printer still leaves the transformer live so you must remember to turn it off at the wall.

It is simplicity itself to set up, as are most usb connectivity machines; incidentally this machine is usb only. In summary stick the CD in and follow the instructions through, your pc may reboot itself at some time. Connect printer to mains and pc with leads, insert couple sheets paper, turn on, and keep following instructions on pc. Insert the two ink cartridges and press enter to print test pages, the scanner display will then tell you to scan the printed test pages to run alignment test. You are n
ow up and away.

The paper tray is large, it says maximum 150 sheets but this is bit silly as output tray holds only 50 and isn’t that strong so I wouldn’t recommend endurance testing it. The printer will accept 60 to 90gsm weight paper, so flimsy through to fairly stout quality paper. You can also print card to 200gsm and feed through envelopes. It knows all the standard paper sizes, A4, letter, legal etc and everything between if you custom print and all the standard envelope sizes, cards etc. It will also happily accept transparency film and labels. You can reduce/enlarge/fit to page etc, lighten/darken, shift margins and other fancy bits, and can control all this on the actual printer or through your pc.

Replacement print cartridges are a rip-off for all printers as we all know, but look out for special offers and they will work out at nearer £20 rather than the standard £25 plus. For the next set I shall try internet shopping for them. Personally I wouldn’t recommend re-filling the cartridges until your machine is well out of guarantee and this procedure will probably invalidate it if any problem is related to ink or print heads. The colour cartridges come in two sizes; the larger is better value for your money.

Speed is good for the average home user. Manufacturers quote prints per minute but these tend to be pretty meaningless as speed obviously depends on both quality and density of what you are printing.

When you look at a letter you want to print out, the print coverage, as in actual printed to the unprinted white space area, may be anything from 10% to 70%. My letters may not be life stories, and I am not writing any tomes, but an average letter on “normal” quality, rattles out as fast as I can press ok to print, glance at the clock, save the file and turn round.

Straight copying is just as fast, like any photocopier, stick the paper on the glass and press go. One joy of this mac
hine is when you turn it on it is ready to print in about ten seconds, if that, none of the chunterring around like my old Canon that takes five minutes to sort itself out before saying “ready”. It isn’t that quiet, few clunks and clicks, but does that really matter?

I haven’t experimented that much with different quality papers, but standard cheap 80gsm has suited all my black and white and colour printing needs so far. I have also scanned numerous very old sepia photographs and printed them out on bog standard paper and the results are startlingly good, better than on coated paper. Colour photos I have scanned in and printed for sending to friends are, again, quite acceptable on this same paper. Incidentally I have laminated those old sepia photos and they are as good as any professional glossy reprint.

Scanners and printers get slagged off for their poor quality of processing images especially colour photographs. I would dare to suggest people fail to realise the original needs to be bright, contrasty and pin sharp, only then will you get the superb results you are expecting.

You cannot expect the average snap to be magically transformed through your printer into a professional calendar quality image, they aren’t THAT clever; same old adage: rubbish in, rubbish out. Experiment with one of your snaps and a photo from a calendar, you will be amazed at the variation in quality. I have not found much difference in quality between scanning a picture into my pc and then printing it back out to the printer as against just doing a colour copy, on the technical side I don’t know if there should be any difference, someone can tell me.

Another good test is to print out digital photos that you have taken or an image you have picked from a website. These, if they are of even mediocre quality, print out superbly.

The published speed for colour printing is a measly 4 pages per minute but any prin
ting I have done, they roll out at twice this speed on ordinary paper, again it is all about density. Remember 8 ppm is only 7.5 seconds of your life, are we that impatient! Your psc750 might struggle for more than a minute to get make a reproduction of that snap of you cavorting in your little black dress in some dive last night in the disco lights, you can’t blame it!

Straight black & white copying of papers is almost instant: on the glass, press go and out it rolls by the time you pick the original off the glass, who can complain at that for a home photocopier. A much cleaner copy than our thousand pound traditional copier at work.

Another thing worth pointing out is how people moan at the resolution, dots per inch, of their scanners and printers. This machine is the standard 600x600, which is adequate for all but the professional. Scanning at silly resolutions like 9600 dpi will create image files of megabyte proportions which you cannot handle. Unless you have an ultra fast pc with gigabytes of RAM and disk space, a professional editing package and access to colour laser printers this is all a bit pointless. The files are too big to email to anyone and at the end of the day the quality of your image is determined either by the printer or your monitor. Most scanned images will look brilliant on any half decent monitor.

I think we need to wait a few more years before traditional celluloid negative to positive photography will be replaced by printing to home printers at realistic prices, and people shouldn’t expect too much yet.

The “Director” is the screen displayed when you double click your printer icon on your desktop, and allows you to perform, on screen, what you can do by pressing the buttons on the printer itself, and more. It is rather grandiose for what it is but is but it is handy.

You can just Copy; Scan to E-Mail which just scans and opens your email package with the scanned im
age already attached to a blank email, or Scan which asks you where to stick the scanned image. Depending on the software on your pc it will open and put the image directly into your chosen program in, eg Word, E-Mail again, Kodak Imaging or wherever, in one move, quite useful.

The basic imaging software doesn’t allow you to do much with your scan, just rotate, reverse etc. You need to save it or copy it into Paintbrush or any other imaging software to play with it.

On the installation CD you also get ReadIris, the ocr package, but personally I find this program hard work, and as I have little use for it at the moment, won’t go into it here.

Definitely the psc750 is my bargain of the year, highly recommended.

Summary: