The HP Deskjet range of printers have been around for what seems like an eternity. The old saying that you're never more than six feet from a rat could also be applied to HP Deskjets, as they seem to be the choice of printer for nearly every small office and home in the known universe.
The reason is, of course, that they’re generally cheap to buy, cheap to maintain and can take a surprising amount of abuse before they go on to that great recycling plant in the sky or wherever it is these things go once they leave your possession.
The HP Deskjet 1510 is no exception. Although it's a pretty unassuming looking printer, it's designed to be a simple as possible while still offering basic multifunctional duties for as little as £29 (from the HP shop).
It can scan, copy and print up to 60-sheets from the flip up paper tray, while spitting the printed documents out through the pull down tray at the bottom of the printer. The control of the printer is pretty simplistic; there's no fancy LCD display like we saw on the last couple of examples and, of course, since this is USB only, there are no e-related functions or smartphone abilities. The control panel, therefore, is just a press pad affair for power, cancel job, and mono and colour scans. It works, but we did find that we needed to really give the pad a good push to activate the button. It put us half in mind of getting the hit-and-miss keyboard of a ZX81 to work.
It actually uses the same HP cartridges as the previous HP model we reviewed, the 301 range, with a single black and single tri-colour cartridge, so the cost per page and yield are exactly the same as before. However, the print speeds differed wildly.
Text printi came in at around seven pages per minute, with colour being measured at an astonishingly slow less than 1 page per minute, it actually took about three minutes for the print to finish. We're not sure why it took so long to spit out a colour print, the same colour photo that we've used on the other printers, but for some reason or another the printer decided to stop midway through the print and take nearly 50 seconds to contemplate what it was doing next.
As for print quality, the HP 1510 wasn't brilliant. A page of text was readable - there were some smears and a dab of loose ink at some points, but the text on the page was okay. It wasn't as sharp as the previous printers, and the same goes for the colour print. Although the quality was okay, it just wasn't up to the same kind of standard as the previous HP or the two Canons we've already tested.
So despite the low initial cost, it really isn’t worth the hassle, and you’d be better off just spending more on one of the other printers in this group test. The multifunction elements work well enough, but slow printing and poorer quality means you'll be left wanting sooner rather than later.