Sitting proudly at the top of HP’s popular
Photosmart range, the 7520 e-All-in-One is a wireless multifunction device for
home photo printing, and is AirPrint compatible for printing from your iPad,
iPhone or iPod touch from the comfort of your sofa, as well as from your Mac
via USB or Wi-Fi.
And its talents don’t end there: the 7520
is packed with useful extra features, including a 25-page automatic document feeder
(ADF) and even a fax modem, in case you urgently need to get in touch with the
1980s. All of this should make it an all-rounder capable of taking on a range
of office duties.
HP
Photosmart 7520 e-All-in-One
The e-All-in-One is quite big and boxy for
a printer you’d want on display in your house, with a tilting touchscreen
control panel that looks like someone has stuck an Android phablet on the front
of the case. But we were won over by the brilliant touchscreen interface. The
4.3in screen is surrounded by context sensitive function buttons displaying
clear and feature rich menus. It’s generally quick to respond to taps and
swipes, although we found it helped to briefly tap-hold selections to be sure
the input had registered. This huge screen is put to good use, offering natty
features such as a document preview during copy operations.
Photosmart
7520 e-All-in-One is packed with useful extra features, including a 25-page
automatic document feeder (ADF) and even a fax modem, in case you urgently need
to get in touch with the 1980s
The Photosmart 7520 uses the increasingly
popular five-ink setup, which includes a pigment black for text printing on
plain paper, and dye-based black, cyan, magenta and yellow inks for photos.
Unlike some other systems, HP’s photo black inks are only used during photo
prints, which meant we couldn’t include it in our running cost calculations.
Excluding this factor, a page of mixed text and graphics should cost just under
7p, which is quite reasonable. HP’s figures suggest that the photo cartridge
will last for an average of 290 6 x 4in photos, which works out at roughly 4p
per photo for this cartridge alone.
The huge screen provides features such
as a document preview during copying operations
Typically for an HP, the Photosmart 7520
produced good-quality results on plain paper, delivering crisp black text at a
rapid 12.5ppm and nearly reaching 19ppm at Draft quality. Color speeds were
less impressive, but eth results were good. You’d hope a photo-orientated
printer would also excel on glossy paper, but the 7520 was disappointing in a
couple of ways. At its highest resolution setting, available only through the
driver’s unfriendly advanced settings, it was a touch slow, and the results
looked in places as though they’d been auto-sharpened too much. More seriously,
you can only select borderless prints in the advanced menu, and even then our
prints on HP’s own paper had narrow borders along two edges.
On
tap: HP’s touch-screen interface is more than a gimmick – it’s a surprisingly
great way to operate a printer
Even though this all-in-one inkjet’s scan
interface contains a couple more options than usual, it’s still
over-simplified, particularly for the type of creating user who might be
attracted to a photo product. There are no automatic crops or levels, and
despite the presence of an ‘Optimize for image quality’ tick box, all our scans
looked over-sharpened and artificial. We were also perplexed that the Scan Size
box defaulted to US Letter paper rather than A4.
It’s difficult to avoid the impression that
this is a high-quality all-in-one that’s been let down by simplistic drivers
and over-zealous scan sharpening that can’t be deselected. That really is a
shame, because the Photosmart 7520 e-All-in-One is otherwise a rather impressive
device.
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HP
Photosmart 7250 Specs
§ Info:
www.hp.com
§ Needs:
OS X 10.6 or later
§ Pro:
Excellent touchscreen interface – Loads of features
§ Con:
Simplistic drivers – Disappointing photo prints – too much scan sharpening
§ Best
value: $189
§ Verdict:
3/5
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