HP Officejet Pro L7590

Most inkjet all in ones (AIOs) have a particular set of features defines them as being for the office rather than the home. Typically, office oriented AIOs have an Ethernet connector and an automatic document feeder (ADF) they can print, scan, and fax over a network work as standalone copiers and fax machines and send e-mail by launching an e-mail message on your PC and attaching a scanned document.

Hewlett-Packard's Officejet Pro L7590 All in One Printer ($299.99 direct) offers all of these features, as well as high quality output and fast speed. Usually, the print engines found in office inkjet AIOs are indistinguishable from those found in AIOs for the home.

They do a fairly good job of printing photos but not such a good job with text, even though the text output is usually good enough for most business needs.

The L7590 is different. It prints text surprisingly well but falls down a bit when it comes to photos. The result is an AIO that's truly focused on office use, and squarely targeted at the small and home office.

The L7590 weighs 34,3 pounds, which is on the heavy side for an inkjet but still light enough for one person to move around. A potentially more troublesome issue is the size. At 14 by 20.7 by 18.4 inches (HWD), it would be too be to place on many desks. And for some small home offices, where space is tight, you may have trouble finding room for it.

Setup is reasonably typical for an inkjet, but with some notable idiosyncrasies. After removing the packing materials and snapping on the trays and the control panel faceplate, you have to install four ink cartridges and two printheads, with each printhead handling two ink colors. You can then connect the power cord, load paper, and wait an unusually long time about 12 minutes for the auto alignment pages to print.

Fortunately, this is a one time operation, since the printheads last the life of the unit. After finishing the physical setup, you can connect a cable and run the automated installation routine from disc. I installed the AIO using an Ethernet connection and Windows XP. According to HP, the L7590 also comes with drivers for Windows Vista, Vista x64, Windows 2000, XP x64, and Mac OS X versions 10.3.9 and 10.4.x.