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The HP Officejet 7410 All-in-One has all the features of HP's Officejet 7210 and then adds some, making it an excellent fit for a small office.
Priced at the higher end of the scale, the unit offers the following in return for the added investment: wireless networking, a 2.5-inch color LCD, a duplexer, an additional paper tray, and a bigger scanning area. While you can hook the 7410 up to a single PC via its USB port or plug it into the office ethernet, the unit's built-in Wi-Fi will make it appeal most to a workgroup of notebook users who aren't tied to their desks.
Besides providing printing and scanning functions, the 7410 offers stand-alone faxing and a 50-sheet automatic document feeder that makes multipage copying easier. The 7410 can fax in color, and it can hold 150 a??pages in memory for incoming faxes, in case the paper runs out while you're not there. To print photos without a computer, you can either attach a PictBridge-compatible digital camera to the 7410's direct-print port or slide your camera's memory card into one of four slots, which between them are capable of reading all the major formats. The 7410 doesn't let you read images from a USB flash drive attached to the direct-print port, but you can plug in a $60 Bluetooth adapter that lets you print from suitably equipped phones and PDAs.
The 2.5-inch color LCD is a major improvement over the 7210's two-line alphanumeric LCD. It sits at the center of the control panel, surrounded by sets of buttons sensibly arranged by task (fax, copy, photo, scan, and print). A numeric keypad lets you dial fax numbers, and there are five programmable speed-dial buttons. In addition to using the monitor to preview your images, you can print an index proof sheet, fill in a special mark under each image you want to print, and then scan that sheet to initiate the print job.
The 7210's optional 250-sheet paper tray comes standard with the 7410, giving it a maximum capacity of 400 sheets of plain paper. The duplexer lets you save paper by automatically printing on both sides. While most of the 7410's rivals have letter-size scanning beds, this unit lets you lay down books and documents up to legal size.
Out of the box, the 7410 comes with a pigment-black cartridge designed for high-quality text and a tricolor cartridge. However, you can print with up to six inks by swapping out the pigment black cartridge and substituting a photo color cartridge containing light cyan, light magenta, and a dye-based black. For printing black-and-white photos, HP offers a photo-gray cartridge.
The 7410 is a capable printer, especially when printing black-and-white documents with its pigment ink. We saw nice, dense text with relatively sharp edges. Our challenging line-art test was almost flawless, with just a little horizontal banding that looked more like a wavy watermark. Prints of color graphics weren't quite as good: Images looked a little fuzzy, with slightly dull colors. Using all six inks on glossy paper gave us wonderful photos, with natural-looking skin tones, vivid colors, and superb shadow detail. This isn't the fastest inkjet printer, but results of 6.9 pages per minute for text and 2.1 ppm for graphics do place it above the norm. Our color photo printed on letter-size glossy paper in a speedy 67 seconds.
Our judges awarded a top score to the 7410's scan of our monochrome-resolution test chart. However, when scanning color photos and text documents more like those it will encounter in everyday use, the unit performed less well. Scan speed was not especially fast, with our 4-by-5-inch color photomontage taking 11 seconds (not including the preview). As a copier, the 7410 was both fast and precise.
Upshot: Whether you're connecting wirelessly to print and scan, or just making copies, the HP Officejet 7410 All-in-One delivers fine quality and excellent paper handling.
Paul Jasper
