HP PSC 1610 review

Hewlett-Packard's PSC 1610 isn't as stylish as Canon's Pixmas, but it's not ugly or offensively clunky either.

Digital camera owners will be pleased to find memory card slots on the front of the device, allowing them to print directly from their camera's flash card. The 1610 also has a PictBridge port, so if your camera supports the PictBridge standard, you can plug it straight into the 1610 and print off your photos without a PC.

Setting the 1610 up is relatively straightforward, you just install the driver and plug it in. It's a shame, though, that HP couldn't have provided a more cut-down version of its driver software. The standard driver is 780MB and takes a long time to install. Even the 'express' driver is 385MB in size and still takes several minutes to install.

The 1610 has space for two cartridges. If you're printing text or images other than photos, you use the normal colour cartridge and the black cartridge for four-colour printing. If you're printing photos, you swap the black cartridge for a photo cartridge containing black, light cyan and light magenta ink. This allows the printer to create a greater range of more subtly differentiated tones. It would have been nice if it had been possible to have all three cartridges installed at once, rather than having to go to the hassle of swapping them around. Maybe next time.

The 1610's running costs are generally okay. Colour and photo prints are reasonably priced, but black and white prints cost 4p per page. That's cheaper than the Epson, but more expensive than most of the other products on test here.

Once the cartridge swapping is over, the PSC 1610 produces excellent prints. Its text and photo results were on a par with the Pixma MP750, and were produced reasonably quickly. Our text document emerged in a speedy 1 minute 11 seconds, and the borderless A4 photo arrived after 11 minutes and 36 seconds. Results in our copying tests were similar. The 1610 produced copies to rival the more expensive Canon device, but some took longer to arrive - the first copy of our text document took over 40 seconds where the MP750 had finished in 20.

The two-line display and buttons on the PSC 1610 make selecting copy options fairly easy, but we were a little confused by the juddering progress bar shown on the display during copying.

The PSC 1610 produced good results in both of our scanning tests, but lagged behind the quality produced by both Canon devices.

Photo prints looked slightly grainy when they were blown up and the descreening option (to remove the dot pattern from magazine and newspaper images) left some harsh edges on the test images.

Small niggles aside, the PSC 1610 will be ideal for most home users. It's reasonably priced, easy to use and produces good prints fairly fast. Our only concerns are its mediocre scanning abilities and high black and white running costs, otherwise it's a great buy and highly recommended.