Hewlett-Packard Australia Officejet 6210

While lasers are an obvious choice for high-volume printing because of the lower cost of operation, most homes - and a number of small businesses - look to ink purely for the ability to print in colour.

HP's Officejet 6210 All-in-One combines a fax, printer, copier and scanner into a single 45 x 39 x 24cm device. The unit is pitched at a small business or demanding homes and includes a 33Kbps fax modem, A4 flatbed scanner, and an automatic document feeder. The Officejet relies on two separate tanks to store ink (one black, and one tricolour cartridge). The use of two ink tanks greatly simplifies maintenance, however it's also inefficient, as you have to throw away the colour cartridge as soon as one of the three pigments runs dry.

The packaging includes all you need to get up and running, and there's even a photo paper storage bag to help protect unused paper over time. The unit ships with drivers to handle every version of Windows from 98SE onwards, and the Mac platform is supported from release 10.1.5. HP-branded software is bundled for both operating systems to cover the gamut of the Officejet's functions, but we found the applications complicated and slow.

The silver front panel is well laid out, and buttons to control each function are clearly separated and labeled. The fax and copy settings take up the majority of the front panel with a small LCD display providing adequate feedback. The machine includes a USB connector to interface with a computer, and is a USB PictBridge port on the front for a direct connection with a digital camera. There's no memory card reader, though.

In testing, the 1200 x 2400dpi flatbed scanner produces clear, sharp scans with accurate colour reproduction and deep flesh tones, and the output quality of the bundled 1200dpi tricolour cartridge was impressive. HP also offers an optional 6-colour cartridge for those looking for photorealistic prints. Black-and-white draft mode saw the printer printing at around 19 pages per minute, but the speed dropped to less than two pages per minute for colour at the highest quality setting.

The 6210 includes capacity to store a hundred fax pages in memory, but unfortunately the 100-sheet input capacity could prove inadequate for small businesses, and a 50-sheet output tray will need constant monitoring in a busy environment.