Advent A10

PC World, part of the Dixons group, has long sold computers under its own Advent brand name, but the A10 printer-scanner and its relatives represent the shop's first foray into own-brand printing.

It's actually built by Kodak but this printer represents a different proposition to Kodak-badged models – those tend to cost more up-front and are cheaper to run, while the A10 is cheap to buy.

Its looks are simple, with paper feeding from a feeder mounted at the back and above the flatbed scanner section. A simple but well-furnished control panel, also on top, has a 38mm colour screen.

There's a single memory card slot, taking both SD and Memory Stick cards, and a single socket at the back for the USB connection to the computer. There's no wireless connection, which isn't surprising given the price.

PC World reckons on speeds of 6 pages per minute (ppm) for black text and 4ppm for colour. In draft mode our tests exceeded this with a maximum of 8.6ppm for black text. Even in normal mode it came up with respectable speeds of 5.2ppm and 3.3ppm for black and colour
respectively.

The device uses both a black cartridge and a triple-colour one, rather than the five-colour inks Kodak uses in its own printers. To replace the cartridges you need to lift the scanner section onto its flip-out supports and snap the two Advent cartridges and the replaceable print-head into place on the supplied carrier.

Print quality was pretty good for such a cheap multi-function device, with sharp black text, reasonable graphics and better-than-average photo prints. Copies from the flatbed scanner showed good definition, but the colours were a bit washed-out.

The A10's main problem is its on-going cost. With the black cartridge costing £12 and the tri-colour one costing £20 for 225 and 250 pages respectively, running costs work out at 5.5p for black and 14.4p for colour.

These are considerably higher than similarly priced alternatives from the likes of Canon and Epson, where 3p and 8p are the average.

Given that other printer makers can offer both low purchase prices and low running costs, the on-going costs of the PC World A10 are disappointing.