Officejet Pro L7680

Cheryl England — Mon, 04 Jun 2007 18:12:05 -0500

The OfficeJet Pro L7680 is a much tidier and more compact solution than a separate printer, scanner, and fax machine.

The Officejet Pro L7680 packs an impressive variety of functions for its smallish price of $400. It includes everything a small office needs: printing, copying, scanning, and faxing with color or black-and-white documents. Even better, all the functions are extremely easy to use with clearly labeled buttons and helpful menus, perfect for a business with no in-house technical support staff.

The printer comes with one 250-sheet paper tray and handles a variety of media including plain or photo paper, envelopes, labels, index cards, and transparencies in a variety of sizes. It also features automatic double-sided printing that worked like dream. The L7680 can easily be connected to an office network using the built-in 10/100BT Ethernet or via the optional Jetdirect ew2400 Wireless Print Server ($199.99). The unit uses four separate ink cartridges (black, cyan, magenta, and yellow) that HP prices at a reasonable $19.99 for black and $14.99 for the colors. HP also offers higher-capacity cartridges for a bit more: $34.99 for black, $24.99 per color.

All of the functions, not just the printing, are well thought out and provide most features a small office requires. For example, the copier offers reduction and enlargement options from 25 to 400 percent. The fax can hold up to 125 pages in memory (we tested it with a 100-page fax), holds up to 99 numbers in speed dial, and allows for delayed sending and forwarding of faxes.

Print and copy speeds aren't blazing fast, however. And you won't get the same print or scan quality that you would from specialized printers and scanners. When printing a 20-page black-and-white Word document, the L7680 barely eked out 5 pages per minute in best quality mode. Speeds for color printing were similar, until we threw a multipage full-bleed color document at the L7680, with speeds grinding to barely 2 ppm. Time tests of the copier speeds showed that the L7680 can crank out 30 copies per minute of a single page in either black-and-white or color mode.

While the print and scan quality is quite good, it's no match for dedicated equipment. A laser printer will provide crisper text, and a photo inkjet printer produces richer hues in images. Scan resolution is serviceable but maxes out at a true hardware resolution of 2,400 by 4,800 dpi. You can find a 4,800 by 9,600 dpi scanner, a monochrome laser printer, and a photo inkjet printer for about $100 each, but they'll take up more space on your desk and you won't have the fax functions.

The bottom line. The Officejet Pro L7680 is an extremely well-designed color all-in-one that will fit nicely into any small-office environment.

COMPANY: HP
CONTACT: www.hp.com
PRICE: $399.99
REQUIREMENTS: Mac OS 10.3.9 or later, USB
Excellent value. Extremely easy to use. Solid features for all functions.
Slow print speeds. Some compromises on image quality.

Deskjet F380

Roman Loyola — Sat, 30 Sep 2006 20:17:26 -0500

This all-in-one's a small-in-one.

The Deskjet F380 is an inkjet color printer, copier, and scanner that'll save a ton of space on your desk, and its upfront cost is cheap. But make sure you hang on to the dollars you save - you're going to need them to buy extra ink.

Measuring 16.8 by 7 by 10.2 inches, the F380 is ideal for that corner spot on your desk - it's definitely a space saver. In fact, it's smaller than many inkjet printers. Leave ample space above the F380, because you'll need to lift open the scanner lid when scanning something.

The 4,800-by-1,200-pixels-per-inch printer uses two ink cartridges. For printing text and basic graphics, it has one tricolor cartridge (cyan, magenta, yellow) and a black cartridge. When you want to print photos, you can pop out the black cartridge and replace it with a three-color HP photo ink cartridge ($24.99). Using six colors gives your photos better color fidelity - but make sure you have some extra ink handy. The cartridges are rated to last 125 pages, but that can vary depending on what you're printing and what print quality you select. For example, we ran out of black ink after printing 154 pages of text at Normal quality; however, when printing 15 Keynote slides (each with a blue, full-bleed background), we ran out of cyan ink after only eight slides.

The F380 isn't fast, but you get what you pay for. It took over 10 minutes to print a 50-page monochrome text file - HP's rated black-and-white print speed of 20 pages per minute is for Draft quality. It took nearly 20 minutes to print our 15 Keynote slides at Normal print quality. The 1,200 dpi scanner took 24 seconds to scan a 4-by-6-inch color photo at 300 dpi - good speed. A color copy of an 8-by-10-inch page took 80 seconds; a black-and-white copy of the same page took 44 seconds. Not bad for such a mighty mite.

Text is not laser quality, but it's better than acceptable. Our color charts had nice saturation and vibrancy, and our slides didn't show any banding. In fact, our full-bleed slides didn't warp plain paper as badly as we've seen with other inkjet printers. And you definitely need to spring for the photo ink cartridge, because the color accuracy is much better than with just the four basic colors. Our photos looked accurate and sharp, though we noticed a slight magenta cast to them.

The bottom line. The F380 is a capable all-in-one for a single user or an office that has low-volume printing and scanning demands.

COMPANY: HP
CONTACT: www.hp.com
PRICE: $79.99
REQUIREMENTS: Mac OS 10.3.9 or later, USB
Small. Good print quality.
No duplex. No fax. You'll need to have extra ink handy. No PictBridge connector.

Mac|Life all-in-one printer RSS Feed

Officejet Pro L7680

Deskjet F380