hp officejet 5610 all-in-one review: a trusty, old printer
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| paper trays The hp officejet 5610 is an all-in-one printer with the capabilities of fax, copy, scan, and print. The printer did not come with a usb cable in which they were sold separately at that time. The design of the printer is close to minimalist and a not too flashy control panel. The printer has an auto document feeder on the top in which it is used for copying, scanning, and faxing. At the time the printer was produced, HP has been advertising on the space saving feature of having the paper input tray in the front, right under the output tray which is also convenient for some. Beside the control panel, there is a door for replacing ink cartridges. |
Control panel and software
The officejet 5610 has a simple and straightforward control panel with a speed dial, pause/redial, power, a list of numbers for speedial, and a number pad to the left of the screen. The screen is very simple, only showing text and numbers in black. The screen interface is more like any cordless phone or a cell phone from at least 7 years ago. There are the function buttons for a use without the computer except for scan. Bellow the screen, there is a setup right and left, OK, and cancel buttons. The drivers included with the printer are compatible with Mac and Windows 98 to xp. Drivers for 64-bit Windows vista and 7 are available for download. Ubuntu and Windows 7 can automatically detect the printer and has many of the software that would make the included drivers and software unnecessary.The drivers and software can bog down an old computer with more than a gigabyte of space.
Printing
For monochrome prints, the printer performs decently with documents, well, just like any other document in monochrome. Color prints are dismiss able with a good amount of colors, the pictures have a good amount of detail. If you want to print 4x6 inch copies on glossy hp photo paper, the printing modes make a huge difference, with bad prints on its worst setting to the wet ink on highest quality which overdoes printing. For the best glossy photo prints, a dedicated photo printer or a trip to a store that can print out the photos would be recommended. The speed, however, depends on the mode and the drivers itself. Printing speed varies a lot when I was using the standard software in Windows XP and Vista and the mode was on fast, it just spits out paper. On Ubuntu 11.10, no mode could change its mood which means a pretty slow printing, it that means enough time while waiting to print a couple of monochrome pages, I could finish making some text messages. Ink usage is high when you print photos, but gets decent amount of prints on regular documents.
Multi-function purposes
As for copying, monochrome copies are very similar to the original although color copies have a slightly different color. Like printing, copying does take while and the document feeder helps out a lot when having to copy multiple pages. Scanning is good and if the scanning software used has a good amount of editing options, less pain involved. Faxing is pretty decent and not too complicated, the faxes are just a fax, they are ( I assume) are good enough for a fax. A good recommendation for the above is if you use the screen, is to clean it since copies with dust may appear as tiny black dots.
Conclusion
In the end, the officejet 5610 does its job with only a few quirks along the way. Even though it is neither the fastest printer nor makes the best prints, it does its job of being the main printer. It is just good enough and does a new printer be more productive, of course, for now, it is a decent printer that makes decent prints.
