Hewlett Packard HP Officejet 6310 All-in-One Printer Review

When I got married, my wife and I had seperate inkjet printers left over from college that were getting on in years, relatively slow, and required one of our laptops to be up and running to use. We do a decent amount of printing for grad school, and I have an older scanner that also requires a computer to be on to use. So we started looking for an all-in-one printer in a good price range with network capapbility and faster printing and copy times. Any laser printer is out of our price range, and so the HP Officejet 6310 has nicely fit our needs. The only thing it lacks is automatic duplex printing, but I have yet to see a network ready and duplex all-in-one inkjet machine. You can manually duplex print, so it is not a big deal for us, and it can also be hooked to to a single computer by USB if needed.

The biggest surprise for me was the quality on the draft print setting is very good, especially color printing. I can print color figures related to my school work and not have to refer back to the pdf file to understand what it means. I also like the scan features. If I want to do a basic scanning job, I can do it all from the printer itself. Once the software is installed, you choose a computer on your local network and a list of compatible programs will show up that can accept the scan. Another great feature is that you can scan and copy from the document feeder, which is a must for large multi-page jobs.

The card reader on the front of the machine is very nice for digital picture printing. It will print a master sheet(s) of all the photos on the card, and then you can select by number which photos to print. HP also makes photo quality inks for the 6310, and while we have not used them, it is nice to know that better ink is available if we want to print pictures.

If I could, I would've given this printer a 4.5, but I am giving a 4 instead of a 5 for two reasons. The ink cartridges are small (about 10 mls of black and 5 mls for each color in one color cartridge) and HP ink is expensive. However, we get around this by almost always printing in draft mode and using third-party ink refill kits. [...]

The second reason is that to be able to scan directly from the printer to a computer, you must have HP's software installed. It is bulky (450-700MB!), takes a long time to install, and had issues with antivirus and firewall software during the install itself. I had to manually go into the task manager and figure out which files were for the virus scanner (symantec 10) and shut them down. Also, if you want to play around with the scanning resolution and color settings, it must be done from the computer. When it is finally up and running, several printer related programs will run in the background with a total usage of 20 MB of RAM, which is not insignificant if you have an older machine or are running memory-intensive software. To To HP's credit, the software is pretty easy to use though.

Overall, I would highly recommend this printer to anyone looking to consolidate and expand their printing needs into one machine.