Review: HP Officejet Pro L7590 multifunction printer

Part of the HP Officejet family of small-business inkjet printers, the Pro L7590 is a professional-looking multifunction device offering not just colour printing, but walk-up scanning, copier and fax facilities.

Everything, in fact, that a small business might need – and at a remarkably low price. But it’s not necessarily the bargain it might at first seem.

The L7590 is built around a 1,200dpi colour inkjet printer with a 2,400dpi flatbed colour scanner and 50-sheet automatic document feeder fitted on top.

A single paper tray holds up to 250 A4 sheets and the same feeder is used to accommodate envelopes and other materials. Printed pages are ejected onto a somewhat flimsy catch tray on top of the paper drawer.

Maximum duty cycle is 7,500 pages per month with a USB interface for local PC attachment, plus a 10/100Mbits/sec Ethernet port for network sharing. A bunch of slots allow USB and memory card storage devices to be connected and a Bluetooth wireless interface is an optional extra.

It’s also possible to add remote scanning, with scans sent to network shares, although only by ordering the Officejet Pro L7680 (£213 ex Vat), which comes with the Digital Filing option already enabled.

The Pro L7590’s top speed is a claimed at 35ppm (pages per minute) for black-and-white drafts, but we got nowhere near that, averaging 10ppm to 12ppm in this mode and around 8ppm for normal quality documents containing moderate colour. A snap-on duplexer is included as standard and works pretty well, but it does slow things down, adding a significant delay between sides to allow the inks to dry.

Quality was acceptable for most business documents, but photographs were dark and came out still wet, causing significant page curl. We also encountered a lot of paper jams, many of them spurious, with the printer taking up to a minute to recover each time. When we tried to use the special 180g paper supplied by HP, we had to feed it in a sheet at a time to prevent it jamming.

On the plus side, the scanner and copier worked well. The controls were easy to master, the display clear and informative, and reproduction both fast and faithful. The fax machine also worked faultlessly in our tests and was easy to use. Ink cartridges were easy to change too, simply plugging into place behind a door at the front.

Depending on use, the standard cartridges supplied should last for around 820 (black) and 620 (colour) pages, but we’d recommend buying the Value replacements, which are capable of more than double that at a cost of £16 ex Vat for colour and £22 ex Vat for black ink.

HP reckons running costs to be around half that of a comparable colour laser printer, which we think is optimistic. You’re unlikely to have to change the print heads, but general business colour pages could still work out at around 4p to 5p each.

Other concerns were environmental, such as the volume of packaging we had to throw away, especially when installing ink cartridges, each of which was protected by a pair of plastic nozzle covers mounted in two plastic trays inside a plastic bag within a cardboard box.

It also takes 20 minutes to prime the mechanism – and quite a while to shut it down, too. Most business users will, therefore, leave the printer on, consuming expensive power, which would not be a lot, but it’s worth noting that the Pro L7590 isn’t Energy Star-rated.