HP Deskjet 3050A review

At this price, HP’s Deskjet 3050A is one of the cheapest MFPs we’ve ever seen. Despite its budget leanings, it has integrated Wi-Fi, a square 5cm mono LCD screen, automatic print head alignment and support for HP’s ePrint, which means you can send documents directly to it from mobile devices and via Google’s Cloud Print service. Build quality is a little flimsy and its paper tray can hold just 60 sheets of A4. However, it’s also very compact, making it inconspicuous.

Typically for a budget printer, the 3050A has just two ink cartridges, one black and one tri-colour. This is a notoriously expensive way to buy ink – page costs work out at 3.3p per mono page and 8.3p per page of mixed black and colour printing. Those prices don’t take into account the fact that you’ll have to change your colour cartridge as soon as any one colour runs out. However, running costs are less of an issue if you don’t print very often.

The print engine can print at resolutions between its native 600x600dpi and a maximum enhanced resolution of 4,800×1,200dpi. If you enable maximum dpi in the printer’s Advanced settings, you’ll have to wait around 4 minutes for a single 4x6in photo. Enhanced resolution prints look a little sharper, but the improvement isn’t sufficient to justify the extra time.

Heavily illustrated colour documents looked fantastic, with very slight white speckling in areas of dense colour, but otherwise were sharp and vibrant. They print at a slow 1.7ppm, though. The lettering on our text documents is pin-sharp in both draft and standard quality. In fact, although draft text is almost twice as fast at 11.6ppm, it’s virtually indistinguishable from standard quality mono text at 12pt sizes.

Photo prints are bright and colourful, but they’re a little grainy and there’s faint banding if you look closely. This becomes more pronounced as ink begins to run out. Dark areas in particular aren’t as intense a printer with a photographic black cartridge – one very dark area was more red than black. There’s no support for borderless printing, which further limits the 3050A’s potential.

The good news is that the 1,200×1,200dpi scanner is good enough for most home document and photo scanning. Colour and shading were accurate but 1,200dpi scans were noticeably banded; 600dpi is the highest resolution we’d recommend using for accurate reproduction.

The scanner interface isn’t as unwieldy as some of HP’s previous attempts, but it’s still restrictive. You can only choose from a set range of scan resolutions, so we were unable to carry out our 150dpi test. However, we liked the ability to add extra pages to our scan before saving it. Mono copies had stark high contrast, with little gradation in dark areas, but were easy to read. Colour copies looked great, with accurate colours and sharp text.

If you print a lot, or plan on printing photos or scanning images for graphical work, you shouldn’t buy this printer. However, it’s perfect for printing the odd map and scanning the occasional bill. It doesn’t cost much to buy, produces good-looking document prints, is compact and covers the basics. At this price, you couldn’t ask for much more, so it wins a Budget Buy award.