Small print
PRINTER | £55 from Amazon www.snipca.com/49652
Printers don’t get much more simplistic than the HP DeskJet 2710e. It’s designed to be a light-use home-office machine with all the bells and whistles left off. What remains is a no-fuss, no-frills machine that’s ideal for anyone who prints between 50 and 100 pages a month.
Its compact design is a big part of the appeal. At just 154x425x304mm (HxWxD), it can fit in a corner or cubby hole, and is one of the smallest printers we’ve seen for a while.
It’s simple to set up with software you install on your PC or via a smartphone app. The idea is that you turn the printer on, install the two cartridges, and add the printer to your Wi-Fi network. If you prefer you can connect it via a USB port, but if you don’t set up the network you won’t be eligible for online benefits such as the free six-month ink subscription.
The printer is no speed demon. Our 24-page mono document took nearly 19 seconds to start, then printed at a rate of 9.9 pages per minute (ppm). Colour documents took 50 seconds to start, then were churned out at a rate of 5.7ppm. This is about as slow as printers get.
Print quality is fine for the price, but nothing special. In Better and Best quality modes you get sharp black text, but the definition isn’t as fine or as consistent as you’ll find in more expensive HP models, such as the HP Envy Inspire 7920e (£139 from Amazon at www.snipca.com/42478, reviewed in Issue 636). Colour business graphics are punchy, but you can see slight signs of banding and dithering on gradients. It can print photos but they’re not good enough for framing.
Cheap printers have a reputation for using expensive cartridges and that’s certainly the case here. HP’s best-value XL cartridges cost £21 for black and £19 for colour, but only produce 240 pages and 200 pages respectively. That is almost 9p per black-and-white page, and 9.5p per colour page. You can reduce this expenditure with an ink subscription, where the cheapest option costs £2.99 a month for 50 pages (6p per page). However, keep in mind that you pay the subscription whether you print or not, and will be charged extra if you print more pages than you’ve committed to.
If that doesn’t suit you, consider paying more up front for an ink-tank printer that’s cheaper to run. The Epson EcoTank ET-2830 (£230 from John Lewis at www. snipca.com/48962), for example, prints for less than 0.5p per page.
SPECIFICATIONS
3-in-1 p
