HP’s Photo smart Premium e-All-in-One (C310a) is an inkjet multifunction with a letter-sized flatbed scanner with scans and copy capabilities. It also offers a long list of hot printing features, like 802.11 wireless printing, a 4.3-inch Touch Smart control screen, the capacity to download and use dozens of Internet printing apps, support for Apple’s Air Print, as well as HP’s own ePrinttechnology. Compared to the like-priced Epson Artisan 725 and Canon Pixma MG5220, the Photo smart Premium e-All-in-One is faster, but not quite as well equipped.
The Photo smart Premium uses five individual ink cartridges: cyan, magenta, yellow, black and photo black. The Photo smart Premium comes with special setup ink cartridges that actually have more ink than the standard ink cartridges. The extra ink in the setup cartridges is there to compensate for the ink used during the initial printer calibration.
The costs for replacement inks are just average; the standard-size cartridges include a 250-page, $12 black and 300-page, $10 cyan, magenta, and yellow. It all adds up to 14.8 cents per four-color page. High-yield supplies are significantly cheaper: The 800-page black costs $35, while each 750-page color costs $18, making for an 11.6-cent, four-color page. A fifth color, photo black, costs $10 for the standard size, which lasts for about 130 4-by-6-inch photos; the high-yield, 290-photo size costs $18.
It’s been a short time since I’ve reviewed an HP printer, and it seems that the software has been refined considerably—dumping fewer icons into the dock and giving more control over what appears where.
In our speed tests, the Photo smart Premium turned in remarkable results. It joined a pretty exclusive club of competitors who needed less than a minute to print our 10-page colorless text file in Word at normal settings. At the other end of the spectrum is our Adobe Photoshop test, a 22MB, letter-sized color photo printed at Best quality: the Photo smart Premium took about two and a half minutes to emerge—an above-average time.
The resulting print was of superior quality; colors were pleasing, with no visible dot patterns or banding, and good detail in darker areas. Choosing a lower-quality setting will, of course reduce the print time, but the quality suffers as a result. Interestingly, choosing Highest DPI print settings, while taking longer to print than the Best setting, did not make much of a difference in image quality. Text quality was also very good, with clean type filled in nicely, though we noticed that the edges were a bit soft.
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