The Officejet 4110 overthrows the PSC 1210 for the smallest All-In-One (AIO) crown. No mean feat, especially when you factor in that this diminutive unit even sports an automatic document feeder (ADF)! Unfortunately, the Officejet 4110 is not without its share of shortcomings. The niggling software problems that plagued the PSC 1210 rear its head here again.

In design, the Officejet 4110 resembles the familiar fax machine. In keeping with the office theme, its white-and-grey finish gives a sleek two-tone guise. Like the PSC1210, the Officejet 4110 eliminates the need for an output tray by letting the output prints lie back over the input tray. This reduces the rather small footprint further but also compromises on productivity as it isn’t easy refilling paper with the printer in operation. The controls found on the 4110 aren’t immediately clear but it’s not a steep learning curve.

The scanner found on the 4110 isn’t of the flatbed variety. The design, together with the ADF, allows for faster copying of multiple sheets of media. However, bounded media such as books can’t be scanned, let alone copied.

Setting up the Officejet 4110 is easy. Included is a huge startup guide detailing steps and instructions that are easy to follow. HP’s control program (HP Director) detects the Windows shell (Explorer) and will only work when that shell is running. Hence, people who are using other shells such as Litestep will find that the control program will not work.

The cartridge compartment on the Officejet 4110. Notice the amount of room available. Customary to HP AIOs, the Officejet 4110 aligns its cartridges by scanning a calibration sheet. The ADF doesn’t work too well with a single sheet of paper; the media tends to be drawn in obliquely. However, there’s no need to worry about it. In our tests, the alignment process was successful as long as the unit was able to read the patterns found on the paper.

Granted we were able to install the AIO this time around, we still had problems with regard to software. From the PC, every single function (from scanning to printing) worked without an issue. However, the moment we tried to run the software from the AIO itself, problems emerged. From the controls on the unit, when we tried to select “scan to Readiris” or “scan to Word”, we were greeted with error messages on our test machine (”The selected program is missing. Click OK, and try reinstalling the software.”). If this was so, I find it odd how everything else worked from HP’s Control Program. Selecting “scan to Wordpad” resulted in an empty document, even though Wordpad actually loaded up.

Then there’s the OCR (Optical Character Recognition) software called Readiris PRO 7.5. This OCR package has been tested thoroughly before in other HP reviews and nothing has changed. It’s still unable to accept text on dark backgrounds or light-coloured fonts well. And when working with heavily formatted text, the OCR also fairs badly compared to Omnipage (which is bundled with the Canon MPC 190 and 200). However, since the 4110 is unable to scan bounded media anyway, the AIO would unlikely face such challenging situations.

For normal text documents, though, Readiris was able to read and transcribe scanned words into editable text fairly accurately; provided the fonts were at least 6pts in size. For users seeking more accuracy, HP’s Web site offers some tips to enhance the performance of Readiris.

The Officejet 4110 uses the same cartridges as the PSC 1210. As such, print quality is closely matched. It generated good-quality photo outputs with both HP PhotoREt 3 (Photo Resolution Enhancement Technology) and 4,800 x 1,200-optimised dpi prints. As before, there was no discernable difference between the outputs of the two modes other than the fact that in 4,800- optimised mode, the time taken was a shocking 8 minutes more than required by PhotoREt 3. That aside, the photos were sharp with vibrant colours on both plain and specially coated media. Text outputs were also commendable, with draft prints coming out very clean and fast. In high- quality mode, fonts at 2pts were even readable. About the only thing you could fault HP here is that the unit does not support “borderless” prints and the outputs are off-center, resulting in a large white space on one end of the paper.

The scanner of the Officejet 4110 also faired well with regard to colour fidelity. The scanned images remained sharp and lost only a little of their saturation and contrast. Although the results from scanning were okay, copies of photos tended to exhibit visible dithering and skin tones were not accurately reproduced.

Because of the Officejet 4110’s ADF, copy speeds were acceptable. It took slightly more than half a minute to copy one monochrome sheet and this was maintained over several documents. Colour copies took 1.5 minutes for normal-quality prints and an additional minute for best-quality outputs. As indicated earlier, it’ll be in your interest to watch the copying if you do not want them to turn out unaligned.

In all, the Officejet 4110 with its solid performance will make its presence felt more than its size would suggest. Retailing at AU$499, it’s also a pretty affordable office All-In-One.

I bought this unit primarily to use as a fax machine. Most of the faxes that I receive include customers’ credit card details. This makes a thermal-transfer fax machine like the inexpensive Brother, Panasonic, and Sharp units unsuitable because they leave the customers’ credit card details in negative form on the film. Inkjet faxes are the next-least-expensive option.

This HP Officejet 4110 surprised me with its combination of features and low price. It’s only slightly more expensive than a dedicated black and white inkjet fax machine, and you get color printing, color faxing, color scanning, color copying, and the 33.6 kbps fax speed. If you absolutely have to have a telephone handset on your fax machine, then maybe one of the dedicated black and white units is for you, but otherwise, there’s not much reason to buy cheaper.

So far I have been impressed with this unit. The installation was painless. It comes with a poster-sized installation flowchart, and everything worked as it should. You install the software first, then hook up the Officejet 4110 and power it on second. You install the ink cartridges through an access door on the right side of the unit. The software installer pauses while waiting for you to power up the unit and align the print head, then carries on once it detects that you’ve done so.

The Officejet 4110 knocks off printing chores quickly, and print quality on plain paper is quite high. In fact, the unit generates higher-quality output at a faster pace than my Canon S800 printer, which is a bit embarassing for the Canon because it cost twice as much. (I imagine than the 6-color Canon would outperform the 4-color HP when printing color photos, though.)

The included software is reasonably complete. You can access all of the Officejet 4110’s functions from the “Director” program. Most of the features of the unit are also accessible from the front panel, but the Director provides a better user interface as well as better integration with your PC. A very convenient feature provided by the Director is the ability to generate a cover sheet for a set of pages that are loaded in the unit’s automatic document feeder (ADF). The Director software will scan in all of the pages, add the cover sheet, and then fax them out. While faxing, the Director displays a thumbnail page that fills in as each page is being sent, an unnecessary but interesting and thoughtful feature. The Director can also store incoming faxes and forward them to another number.

While I bought the Officejet 4110 as a fax machine, I’ve found myself enjoying its other features, which are all well-executed and nicely integrated. For the price, I would have been satisfied with a lot less, so I have to say that Hewlett Packard has really hit this one over the fence.

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