Liberty's Blog

Review HP Officejet 6310 All-in-One

In January last year I bought a Brother MFC-640CW Fax Scanner printer. I liked it, although it did have some things I didn't like about it to much. It used up ink like a drunken sailer, and it was a bit of a pain in the ass to configure. I was able to read faxes from my computer, and store them permanently as a TIF or Gif file. Last May it died on me. I could still manually send and receive Faxes there was no either wireless or hardwired Ethernet. It probably would have worked if connected to my USB hub but that wasn't practical .

I needed to replace it quickly and to be honest I didn't shop to hard. I went to Sams Club and picked out an HP Officejet 6310 All-in-One. I paid about $190 out the door including taxes. It is not wireless. While I thought it was important when I bought the Brother It turned out that I ended up using about 4 feet away from my router. I still have plenty of ports available and even if I didn't a switch is pretty cheap.

Installation was a piece of cake real simple and straight forward. It probably took 1 hour from out of the box, hooking up, and installing software. The software install took forever. its pretty slow although straight forward. I installed it into my desktop and Equality's laptop.

I did have problems. While I was attempting to send a Fax Equality attempted to send out a print job from my computer. Every light on the Fax machine started flashing. Any further attempts to resend the fax caused the flashing light-lock up problem at at page 6. I pulled up the web site and went into chat with the support guy after about 2 hours he had me reset the system by using a magical combination of keys that I wish i had written down. All in all I rate the support as pretty good even though he took me down a garden path. Eventually he did get to the solution and he was persistent. Thats worth points.

My overall impression so far isn't so impressive. With the Brother I was able to view faxes on my computer. This seems to me should be a standard feature and essential to viewing Legal sized documents properly. It's just to bad that HP doesn't understand that faxing is a 2 way communications process. I still have problems sending multiple pages and have experienced the flashing lights when attempting to send pages. When this happens I'm not sure about how many pages did get sent so I send them all over again .. A source of annoyance for the recipients also.

Print quality is pretty good and seems so far to be more economical than the Brother. The scanner is good and convienient. The document feeder seems to handle just about anything. quality, the software/driver software is simple straightforward. The ability to read various camera media and print directly might be a useful feature for some. I prefer to directly view them on the PC , edit and print from the PC. The HP All-in-One does handle most camera media.

There are things I like about the HP. I can read the display. I sometimes had to use a flashlight to read the Brother. The print quality is outstanding, as are the scans. There is a spam blocking feature, I'm sure it would work great if the fax spammers didn't block their caller ID number. Hopefully it will last a little longer than the brother.

Labels: Tech

posted by Liberty @ 1:02 PM