Many inkjet all-in-one printers are notorious for their high ink consumption but not the HP Office-Jet Pro L7580. At full ink capacity, theL7580 printed 81 best quality colour photos before one of the colour ink cartridges ran out.
Another value-for-money feature is the use of individual inkjet cartridges.You need to replace only the cartridge that has run out. The L7580 uses four individual ink cartridges. Each regular cyan,yellow and magenta cartridge costs$24.18 while the black tank costs$32.24.
But the snag is that you cannot print or copy in black and white if any of the colour ink cartridges are empty, even if the black cartridge itself still has ink -and vice versa. On the bright side, this feature ensures the printer prints only if there is enough ink to make a good colour printout.
There are plenty of features that make the L7580 a good option for use by small-office-home-office businessmen and SMEs. For starters, its four-in-one makeup - print, copy, scan and fax -means it handles the basic business tasks.
And with a footprint no bigger than that of an A3 sheet of paper, it saves space in offices where space is a premium.If you take aside the lengthy setup -15 minutes for software installation and12 minutes for alignment and initialisation,the machine is mostly fuss free.
Menu buttons are logically arranged in the front and centre, and clearly labelled.
There is also an LCD panel that,among other things, lets you check ink status at a glance. Bonuses like built-in memory card readers let you print directly the images stored in memory cards like Compact Flash and SD cards.
Give standard office related tasks like printing, copying and scanning text documents,and the L7580 is fast. It sends out a 300-word, A4 text document at 11 pages per minute (ppm) and an A4 Excel chart document at 5ppm.
But photo print speed is not as fast.The machine took more than six minutes to get an A4 borderless colour photo going(at maximum dpi quality), about four minutes to put out the same image at best quality, and about 80 seconds at normal quality.
Copying speed is decent, though. It took 60 seconds to colour copy a Maxim magazine cover at best quality, 20 seconds at normal quality and 15 seconds indraft mode.
The machine also features an auto document feeder that can hold up to 50sheets. The ADF took some two minutes to auto copy 10 sheets of press releases. Print quality is as good for an inkjet AIO: colours are bright, vivid and accurate.
Take the printed image of a fashion brochure, for example. The result showed the fine details of embroidery,the colours and the texture on the fabrics.
Scan quality is one of the best I have seen in a long time. A scanned image of the April issue of Maxim magazine came out very close to the original. Even complex colours like bright orange fonts on the magazine were faithfully reproduced.
FINAL SAY
A dependable, solid, all-rounder that is fit for the office.
