HP Photosmart with Wireless e-All-in-One B110a

Recently HP has ‘simplified’ its printer naming system, which actually makes it harder to identify individual printers.

This one, for instance, mainly has the words 'HP Photosmart' with 'Wireless' on the box, but on closer inspection it reveals itself to be a model B110a (and also a model CN245B, confusingly).

It’s a multi-function device, which is to say that it combines printing functions with scanning and copying. Cleverly, you can also email documents to the printer (from a phone, say) and it will print them out.

It’s not a lot bigger than the average single-function printer, with a tray at the front for both paper input and output. The only sockets are for power and the USB connection to the PC. It can connect to wireless networks, though.

Setup was both simple and confusing. The printed guide explains what you need to do but on switching the printer on it’s necessary to set it up using the small screen.

We first had to select a language and confirm it, then choose our ‘country’ from a rather stupid list that consisted of Belgium, Europe, Middle East, Africa, Asia Pacific, Japan, Australia and New Zealand.

The controls to either side of the screen are not physical buttons but touch-sensitive buttons which we found hard to press – most of the time the device refused to register our button-presses, resulting in us stabbing at it wildly.

The supplied driver CD seemed to install a large amount of stuff on our test computer, and setup took about 20 minutes, all told, which is slower than most.

It comes with the HP ‘Solution Center’ through which you can copy and scan as well as changing the printer’s settings. There’s also HP Photo Creations which has a series of templates for making projects but is not included on the CD – this has to be downloaded separately. The most interesting feature is its internet connection.

Once you’ve set up the wireless link it can access ‘apps’ directly, each offering a different thing, for instance one of them can print off a new Sudoku grid every day.

You can also email the printer a document – having first set up the wireless connection and registered with HP. To prevent spam, the printer will only accept documents from certain addresses that you define. It worked when we tried it, printing both email text and attachments although there are no options to format documents or print specific pages.

Speeds were OK at around seven pages per minute (ppm) for black text and around 10ppm in draft mode. Text quality wasn’t great but photos were very impressive. Running costs are likely to be reasonable – not too high, not especially low.

The purchase price is impressively low too, making this a good product for home use, although if you’re doing a lot of text documents better quality models are available.