More then I expected

I've used a lot of HP and other printers including color lasers. And before buying I do a reasonably thorough job of comparing the latest and greatest. So when I was finally tired of all the space my trusty HP970 printer, my Visoneer Scanner, and Brother FAX machine were taking up I started looking at all-in-one machines. My particular must haves were compact size and both a sheet feeder AND a flat plate scanner. It goes without saying good speed and print quality were must haves too. Lower on the list was price since I plan on having it for at least 3 years and a few bucks saved now doesn't amount to much on a per year basis. Most likely you aren't even reading this if you are not looking for similar features since you can spend at least $100 less if all you really want is just basic printer/fax/flatbed scanner capability. And you can spend $100 more if you want lots of bells and whistles, in which case you should look at the HP 7310. But the 7310 is a LOT bigger.

So how does the 6210 perform.... In simple terms - great!!!!. The installation and setup took about an hour and went without a hitch. I installed all the software that came with it which amounts to around 700 megs. Then I did a variety of scans and prints. The scans were as good or better then any other scanner I've used with excellent "white" in the white areas. One of the problems I've seen on many scanners is that the white areas wind up grey when you try to get the color level up. Not so on this. And while I didn't measure speeds with a stopwatch, scanning speeds seemed quite good. Using the copy function there was little difference in output quality between "normal" quality and "Best" quality. In other words, normal was pretty darn good. The "fast" quality was more then adequate for the usual throwaway copies and printed very fast but was visibly not as good as the normal setting.

To test the photo quality I opened a high resolution photo and using inexpensive glossy photo paper I sent it to the printer on all the highest quality settings. Needless to say, printing was much slower then just a typed document but for a full sized 8x10 photo it came out pretty fast. And the quality was outstanding. The printed photo looked better, and had more detail, then what was displayed on the computer screen - shows the tradeoff between the effective 72 dpi screen display on my hi-res CRT versus the 300 and up resolution of the printed photo. The colors in the printed photo were actually better then what showed on the screen too - the skin tones on the printed photo were better then the screen.

One of my fears was that nowhere in any of the ads or any of the specs available at HPs website, nor in any of the reviews I read was any mention made of this AIO printer having a TWAIN interface. And the manual that comes with it does not even list TWAIN in the index. I figured I could work around it with the HP software, which allows scanning to the clipboard. Then I'd paste the clipboard into my photo editing program, PaintShop Pro 9. Once I had tested all the functions and various printout, copies, scans to verify it all worked I went into the twain setup in PSPro and lo and behold, under "select TWAIN source" the HP6200 was listed. Hallelujah!!. I selected it and it worked just fine. Then I fired up my old PaperPort 7 and it too work fine with the TWAIN interface. So I can skip most of the special HP applications and just use my regular tried and true programs for scanning needs. I've got nothing against the HP programs but they do too much hand holding for my tastes, I'd rather just use my old familar programs that let me get to it.

You can do OCR with the 6210. I tried the built in OCR from I.R.I.S and in a word, it sucks. It turned a one page document into a 4 page word document due to its inablity to handle page elements and there seems to be nowhere to set it up, it's just built into the HP software system.

So I fired up my ABBYY Finereader Pro 7 and tried again. Did the TWAIN select thing as with PSPro. Using a real OCR program it worked fine, doing what FR7 is capable of doing and getting things formated correctly.

There's not much to say about the FAX ability. FAXs are pretty much FAXs and it FAXs. The setup for connecting and testing the phone line connection was very simple yet it considers the many ways people have phone lines setup. The Manual goes into a lot of detail about each way of doing it and how to do it.

And speaking of the Manual, THERE IS ONE!!! A novel change from most of the stuff these days where you get a 3 page flyer that says "The manual is on the CD".

One other thing, it's listed as a 8.5 x 11 scanner but if you put 8.5 x 14 paper in the document feeder then it will scan legal size. And of course if you put legal size paper in the printer part it will print legal size. Lots of other sizes too - see HP's website for details.

It normally does 4 color printing, black and the usual three colors. That was how I printed the 8x10 photo. But you can buy a photo-color cartridge and do six color photo printing if you want by putting in the second color cart in place of the black one. I have not tried that yet - I assume it's better since it's all the rage for lots of printers these days.

So the bottom line is that I'm very satisfied with the HP 6210. It does everything I wanted and better then I expected.