HP Deskjet 1510 review

The HP Deskjet 1510 is an unassuming white plastic inkjet MFP with a 1,200×1,200dpi scanner, a USB port and a handful of buttons. When you set the printer up for the first time, and whenever you change one of the ink cartridges, you’re prompted to print a print head alignment sheet, but rather than having a built-in head alignment system or a manual one that asks you to choose which of several print samples looks best, the Deskjet gets you to scan the alignment sheet and makes its adjustments based on that. It’s a good system, but note that the MFP won’t let you print anything until you’ve done this.

The Deskjet 1510 uses just two ink cartridges: a pigmented mono black ink tank for sharp text printing and a tri-colour cartridge filled with cyan, magenta and yellow dye-based inks that are used for both colour document prints and such photo printing as this all-in-one is capable of.

Tri-colour cartridges are convenient but can be more expensive and wasteful than individual ink cartridges, as you have to replace the entire cartridge if you run out of just one colour. You can take comfort in surprisingly low colour print costs if you buy HP’s XL cartridges: a colour-only page costs just 5.8p; balanced against this is a mono print cost of 4p, which adds up to a decent mixed-colour print cost of 9.8p

When it comes to document printing, the HP Deskjet 1510 does very well. The quality of its mono text prints is among the best we’ve seen at this price, with clear, dark 12pt letters that only have a few slight flaws, even on 75gsm paper. These flaws are so minor that they’re barely visible upon even close examination. Draft quality text prints look very similar, although their lettering is a little thinner with more jagged edges visible on curved letters. Nonetheless, they’re good enough for most day-to-day mono printing, save only formal correspondence.

You’ll save a fair bit of time by using draft mode, as well as a little ink. While standard quality text printed at 7.9ppm, draft got up to 11.5ppm. While the MFP’s standard quality speed is somewhat slow, draft means you needn’t wait an age just to print some directions. Unfortunately, if you want a map to go with them, you’ll probably want to print in colour, which is much, much slower, although you can configure the all-in-one’s driver to print only in greyscale to save time and expensive ink.

HP Deskjet 1510 Print Quality

Our illustrated colour business documents printed at a rate of just 1.4ppm, putting this among the slowest MFPs we’ve reviewed when it comes to colour printing. At least the end result was worth the wait, even if we did have to wait over a quarter of an hour for our colour print job to finish. Text was sharp, even at small font sizes, and graphs, photos and illustrations all looked very good indeed. You’ll ideally want to use 100gsm inkjet paper, and 80gsm paper at minimum, as our 75gsm test page became a little too saturated in ink.

This was also a problem in our colour and mono copy tests, which took 45 and 25 seconds respectively. Copy quality isn’t as good as print quality. It suffers visible print head marks and slightly fuzzy, wavering letters at small sizes, but both our mono and colour copies were legible, at least. Although the MFP lacks a screen, you can still make up to 9 copies at once by repeatedly pressing the copy buttons.

Photo printing is very much an afterthought on this MFP. In fact, it doesn’t support borderless printing at all, which means you can’t even print a 6x4in snap. If you use 6x4in paper, you’ll get a print that’s just shy of 5x3in. Print quality isn’t too bad, given that this printer lacks a photographic black ink. Dark areas looked better after they’d had a couple of days to dry. A fair bit of detail was visible in our low-contrast images, and even areas of subtly gradated shading were fairly smooth. If the 1510 were capable borderless printing, its quality would be entirely respectable given its low price. The absence of this feature means that you’ll have to get to grips with a pair of scissors if you want to print photos, though.

HP Deskjet 1510 Scanners

The Deskjet 1510’s scanner driver is actually pretty good compared to previous incarnations, but it’s still very limited. You’re encouraged to pre-select the size and type of document you wish to scan, and it’s obviously designed with business users in mind. The MFP is fine if you just want to scan A4 documents, but fine control over scanner settings and even the ability to select some resolutions, such as 150dpi, is entirely missing.

Scan speeds were a little slow at higher resolutions; 20 seconds for a 300dpi A4 scan is fine, but we had to wait over two and a half minutes for a 1,200dpi scan of a 6x4in photo. Our 300dpi document scan looked great, and is perfect if you need to keep digital copies of important bills and letters. The all-in-one’s scanner is less well equipped when it comes to photo scanning at 600dpi or 1,200dpi, particularly if you want to edit them later. Scanned images has a slightly yellowish tone, and close examination of areas where one colour met another showed fuzzy lines appearing between them, apparently the product of an automatic sharpening process.

HP Deskjet 1510 Conclusion

The HP Deskjet 1510 is well suited to the home office but not necessarily ideal as a family all-in-one printer, as its support for photo printing is very limited indeed and its scanning is utilitarian at best. It all depends on your individual requirements. However, if you need something with similar capabilities, the HP Deskjet 2540 is currently cheaper, while the Budget Buy winning Epson Expression Home XP-212 is similarly priced but has better print quality.