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An all-in-one with fax for $150 is a deal, plus you can upgrade to wireless printing for $100.
HP and others offer solid all-in-one devices that include printing, scanning, and copying in both black-and-white and color for less than $100. Fax capabilities, however, are becoming harder to find. It’s true that the fax is traveling into obsolescence, but that trip is a slow one, and there’s still a need for faxes in paperwork-heavy businesses. You can get by with using a free online eFax account to receive faxes, and scanning paper documents to email them out, but it’s a tedious process if faxing is part of your daily routine.
Enter the Officejet J5780 All-in-One. This little workhorse offers all of the functionality of standard multifunction printers, plus fax capabilities similar to those of its big brothers in the Officejet Pro series, all at the bargain price of $150. About the only thing you can’t do right out of the box is add the printer directly to a network, but for an additional $100 you can get the HP Wireless Printing Upgrade Kit for Wi-Fi printing on a network (or from your personal Mac).
The J5780 comes with one 100-sheet paper tray and handles a variety of media, including plain and photo paper, envelopes, labels, index cards, and transparencies. It has both a flatbed scanner and an automatic document feeder that can handle 35 sheets of paper. The J5780 is extremely easy to set up and use, thanks to excellent documentation and easy-to-understand buttons and software.
Like most inkjets, however, the J5780’s print speeds aren’t blazing. The J5780 can print black-and-white documents quickly—in our tests, a 10-page text file printed in draft mode at a peppy 25 pages per minute. Printing in normal mode slows to 7 to 9 pages per minute, while printing in best mode crawls along at about 1 to 2 pages per minute. Fortunately, the difference in quality between normal and best modes isn’t significant. Color printing is slower, but still quite acceptable.
The fax capability, however, is the real star of the show. You can store up to 100 pages in memory and up to 100 fax numbers in speed-dial. The fax capability even includes junk-fax detection, but you need to have caller ID in order for this to work. A separate fax manual clearly guides you through setup for your particular configuration. For example, there are instructions for setting up the fax to work with your answering machine or DSL Internet connection.
The bottom line. This thing is a workhorse, and the price is only slightly higher than that of a multifunction printer sans fax. If you send more than the occasional fax, you’ll love the convenience. If you don’t need to network the printer (thus saving the $100 cost of the wireless kit), then the Officejet J5780 becomes an even more amazing bargain.
COMPANY: HP
CONTACT:www.hp.com
PRICE: $149.99
REQUIREMENTS: G3 or later or Intel processor, Mac OS 10.3.9 or later, USB
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Excellent value. Solid features for all functions. Fax capability.
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Slow print speeds. Additional kit needed for networking.
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