HP Officejet 7610

The HP Officejet 7610 is a relatively compact and attractive device capable of A3+ printing, A3 scans and copies and standard A4 faxes. It has both wired and wireless network interfaces, and supports wireless printing from mobile devices via Apple's AirPrint or HP's own ePrint standards. It's easy to set up, although the installer ends by asking for your postcode and an outline of how you'll use the printer; an unwelcome, unnecessary and obligatory intrusion.

HP's print and scan interfaces aren't the best we've used, as they tend to be oversimplified at the expense of functionality. Although they're fine for everyday work, potential frustrations include a lack of truly advanced options in the scan driver and the need to enter the advanced print settings to select borderless or maximum-resolution printing. The print driver's layout page also seemed unaware that double-sided printing is a £50 option: it allowed us to send a duplex print job, which then printed single-sided.

HP's print driver is a bewildering place if you want to change certain options; this 'informational' list about print resolution served only to confuse us
Fortunately the device itself is a pleasure to use, with responsive touch-sensitive controls and the ability to multitask. It can, for example, scan to a USB drive while delivering a network print job. The one slight frustration we encountered was that it automatically applied a firmware update between queued print jobs instead of waiting for a period of inactivity.

Mono print speeds were brisk, reaching a peak of 17.4 pages per minute (ppm) in Draft mode, while colour speed on plain paper was a steady 4ppm. Scans were quick even over a wireless connection, with a 600 dots-per-inch (dpi) photo captured in less than 30 seconds. We weren't surprised that photocopies took only around 20 seconds in mono or colour, but the automatic document feeder proved disappointingly slow; even a 10-page greyscale copy took two and a half minutes.

Text was dark and crisp on plain paper prints, and colours were strong and free from obvious graining. Copy quality was also above average, although there was a tendency for colours to look sombre. Scanned images were sharp and more than adequate for office work, although high-resolution images showed signs of unwelcome image processing.
Despite our complaints about HP's software, the Officejet 7610 is a good A3 MFP for small offices. It delivers strong results swiftly and at under 5p per A4 page it’s quite cheap to run. At this price, however, it's a shame that duplex printing isn't standard. The Brother MFC-J6510DW may be uglier, but it has duplex printing and it costs less.