An A4 printer that's A3 on the inside
Like Brother, HP has worked out that if you design an A4 printer so that the print head travels along the long side of the paper, you can also feed A3 into it. This is because the short side of A3 matches the long side of A4. It’s not a great set up for printing A3 all the time, but handy for producing the occasional poster, say.
HP refers to this as ‘wide format’, which is a tad misleading, as this is the industry term for printers that are at least twice as big. Still, this Wi-Fi model does seem pretty versatile. It can actually take paper up to 322x475mm (larger than A3) and still print all the way to the edge. There’s a scanner built into the top, although geometry dicates that this can only take A4, with a 30-sheet automatic document feeder (ADF) for quick multi-page scans or photocopies. Faxing is also possible, if you have a telephone point nearby and need to transmit documents to the 1990s.
At the bottom is a 250-sheet paper tray for the printer with a lid that will catch up to 75 sheets coming out. Copies came out well in black and white or colour, black text printed crisply and colour documents looked good, although there are better photo printers.
Using HP’s XL cartridges, it’ll cost you less than 4.5p to print a page of text and colour graphics, which is very reasonable. The Officejet 7510 is generally quick compared with other inkjet printers in this price bracket, nearing 15 pages per minute for text, but the noisy ADF took over three minutes to copy 10 colour pages.
As ever, HP’s scanning software let us down, offering too few options and delivering a plain black page when we tried to use the maximum 1200dpi resolution. We were also disappointed that double-sided (duplex) printing isn’t supported: without this, it’s hard work to print A4 pages side by side to fold into a booklet, which would have been a good use of the A3 option.
VERDICT
This chunky printer is very capable in many ways, but Brother beats it with duplex output and less clunky paper feeding.
SPECIFICATIONS
4800x1200dpi maximum print resolution • 8ppm colour and 15ppm mono quoted speeds • 1200x1200dpi maximum scan resolution • USB • 802.11n Wi-Fi • 366x613x483cm (HxWxD) • 13kg • Three-year warranty