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Anyone with a home office becomes a Soho user these days the HP PSC 5510 does scan, copy and print but it can also be used to send faxes, this latter item is something by no means all multi function units can do.

This is both a flatbed and sheet fed scanner and with the excellent ‘Director’ front end software hiding such goodies as Omni Page then the scanned output is excellent. To say white backgrounds should be white may seem obvious but a lot of scanned backgrounds look grey and often the background from double sided pages show through. Not so with my tests of the 5510. In fact output is better than a lot of more expensive units. Being able to put a stack of pages on the tray and just leave the software to work away is an added bonus. The slight drawback is that the shape of the unit prohibits large books being accommodated on the flatbed. I have however copied pages from thick magazines without any problems.

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Copying with or without the PC switched on is possible and some reduction/enlargement is possible working from the machines interface of course more options are available from inside Windows. However for one off copies in either black or colour working from the machines interface is both easy and quick.

Printing – for me anyway – is always going to be the biggest use of the unit. It can print nice output at up to A4 – however not borderless at this size – and the speed is not unreasonable. For textural pages – as always – I am unable to get close to the claimed 17PPM black and 12PPM colour claimed. Printing the ubiquitous 200 word document in draft mode – output quite acceptable and better than some other manufacturers normal mode – ‘x’ times disregarding the first and last copy gets around 10ppm. 

Being able to send a fax is less important today than even a year ago. I normally scan whatever needs faxing and send by email. There is a very nice feature within the HP ‘Director’ software that has an option to scan to email. You scan the document how ever many pages it may be an the result is placed as an attachment in a blank email, you add any covering message and fill in the ‘To’ field, that’s it. Of course if you are on dial up then sending a fax could be cheaper as some files especially those with diagrams or images can be large. However remember there are still very few colour fax machines so this is another factor.

Some MFU units have memory card slots and this can be useful if you print direct from a camera, not sadly with the 5510, however the ‘Director’ software has some basic photo manipulation abilities.

Overall this unit is 42x33x21cm a very small overall size. It has a total of 30 buttons around the LED display on the left front edge, unless you use it for faxing you will probably use only a few of these, the HP price is £189 a search round may get it for less.

Link  http://h10010.www1.hp.com/wwpc/uk/en/ho/WF06b/5043-5527-5563-5563-193517-1199377-5137739.html