All-in-Wonders

Ink Jet: HP PSC 950

Hewlett-Packard's $399 PSC 950 can handle flatbed scanning, color copying, and stand-alone faxing--and it offers some extras for digital camera users. Using one of the three media slots (for CompactFlash, SmartMedia, or Sony Memory Stick removable media) on the MFD's front panel, you can print photos directly from your memory card without going through a PC: Press one button and you get a proof sheet showing every photo on the card. To select the shots you want to print in a larger format, just pick up a pen and fill in the ovals that appear under each proof-sheet image. Fill in ovals for photo size (4 by 6, 5 by 7, or 8 by 10 inches) and type of paper, and then scan the proof sheet back into the PSC 950. It will automatically print the photos you selected on the paper you've chosen. The PSC 950 duplicated color and flesh tones well on our photo paper, though the images lost some detail and sharpness.

The PSC 950 does a good job of printing text. In our test documents, characters looked sharp at the device's standard resolution of 600 by 600 dpi. We clocked the HP at 4.1 ppm printing black text and at 1.2 ppm printing color graphics--both speeds are comparable to speeds for stand-alone ink jet printers.

Two dedicated buttons make copying and scanning extremely easy. The PSC 950 copies text quite well; color copies lose detail and look more washed out than the original. It scans quickly at 600 by 1200 dpi, and scanned images look bright and rich. The OCR application is less impressive, however: In processing our sample document, it missed words at the right margin.

You can send faxes directly from the flatbed panel. But since you have to load the paper one sheet at a time, this feature becomes more trouble than it's worth for faxes of more than one or two pages. The MFD also supports PC-based faxing.

The PSC 950 has two paper trays: one for letter- or legal-size paper, and the other for snapshot-size paper and envelopes. Unfortunately (and annoyingly), it can't sense which tray you're using, so if you don't pull the photo tray out when you're done using it, you'll get an error when you print a larger document.

UPSHOT: More home-oriented than other models, HP's PSC 950 handles simple office tasks and prints photos at a good price.