HP Photosmart 5510 e-All-in-One Printer review

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.