HP PSC 1350 review

If you're fed up with the amount of space your scanner and printer take up, consider an all-in-one.

These devices combine a printer and scanner in one compact unit - enabling them to work as a photocopier, too. We've been impressed before by all-in-ones from HP. The petite dimensions, excellent performance and great price of its PSC 1205 knocked our socks off. The PSC 1350 looks similar, but adds more features.
The most obvious additions are a memory card reader that lets you print photos directly from CompactFlash, SmartMedia, Memory Stick, MMC, SD and xD memory cards. Another is the proof-sheet function. This allows you to print off a sheet of small pictures, each with a tick box next to it. Tick the box next to a picture you want to print, scan the sheet in and the 1350 will print at full size all the pictures you've selected. But what's the point? This is a time-consuming gimmick.
The scanner struggled a little with dark shades, but colour accuracy, especially on skin tones, was generally impressive. Edges were sharp, and fine details were discernible. At a resolution of 600dpi, an A4 print scanned in just 1 minute 12 seconds. While overall quality may not match that of the best standalone scanners, only photo buffs will see the difference.
Photo prints provided excellent detail. Graduated shades suffered from almost no graininess. However, printing was slow, with 6x4in photos taking 3 minutes 45 seconds. A4 prints took an even more pedestrian 13 minutes 52 seconds. Another annoyance is the fact that you have to print 6x4in photos on special paper with an extra tab at one end - otherwise the picture is cropped. Normal text approached the sharp quality of laser prints but was slow to print, at 2.7 pages per minute (ppm). Draft-quality text printed in 9.2ppm but displayed a slight feathering (where the ink spreads out in a spidery fashion). Even so, it's good enough for most users.
Using a standalone photocopier, the PSC 1350 took 33 seconds to produce a text page. Characters were a little fuzzy at the edges, but perfectly readable. Copying an A4 photo took 6 minutes 12 seconds, but displayed grain and banding.
The PSC1350 is a decent product, but HP's improvements don't justify the price hike of fifty quid over the PSC 1205. The older machine is still the better buy.