HP Officejet Pro X576dw Multifunction Printer product reviews

Everyone remembers seeing an inkjet printer doing its thing, little has changed in the years since they first came to the market except a continual reduction in droplet size to give a finer grain image. Until now. Some bright-apark engineer at HP must have realised that the biggest reason you couldn't make an inkjet as fast as a laser is because the print head has to slide from side to side, pause while the paper advances a small amount, then do it's run all over again... sometimes up to four times to lay down the four coloured inks, before the cycle repeats. So... what if the print head was made as wide as the paper and could print the full width all at once?! And with some very fast ink squirting, you might even be able to remove all those paper-advancing pauses too maybe... Eureka! A revolution is born.

Our testing runs showed print speeds up to 66 pages per minute for minimal-quality monocolour prints, and a fair average of around 30ppm for most single-sided 'everyday' print jobs and duplex prints around the 10ppm. While this printer is a speed demon for the office, though no amount of careful document-crafting allowed us to reach the HP-hyped 70ppm rating. Still, these are very respectable speeds, and there is the huge advantage of ink tanks that can handle up to 9200 pages at 5% coverage. Photos were quite acceptable, with no detectable loss in quality over current 'photo-grade' printers I have worked with in the last few years. Speed-wise they were either on-par with, or faster than, published benchmarks from similar models by other brands. You'll discover that because it is ink-based, it produces a wider colour range and can produce cleaner glossy photos than a laser too - another bonus for those top-notch presentations to impress potential new clients... or bosses.

Add to that a raft of extra features, including Ethernet and WiFi connectivity, a 50-page full-duplex ADF (Automatic Document Feeder) attached to the onboard flatbed scanner, touch-screen control, remote setup and configuration via PC, print-from and scan-to USB pendrive, remote printing via Cloud interface, 500-page paper tray as standard plus the option of adding a second tray underneath, plus a 50-page manual feeder on the side capable of handling business-card weight stock and envelopes, plus the ability to scan to print, scan to PC, scan to USB drive and scan-and-send via email in a number of formats, and this unit does pretty much everything you could want in the office... and yes, you can drive all these from the PC too.

And just for all those who still struggle to get on board the modern bandwagon, it even does faxes.

When it comes to refueling the beast, the official carts can set you back upwards of $510 for a full set (best deal via Mighty Ape) or $690+ for the High-Yield (best deal via HP) which can be a bit scary to look at until you keep in mind that the entire set of inks is less than most SINGLE colour laser printer toner carts, and gives you a lot more coverage. However, you can, if you look around a bit, find suitable fully-compatible 3rd-party ink carts that come with a guarantee that if they damage your printer, they'll get it fixed. Which isn't too bad a gamble when you see that the 3rd-party carts weigh in at around $90 each. I'm not advocating that you void your warranties, but it's something to keep in mind once the warranty has run out anyway.

The negatives are few, but important. The biggest bug-bear I found with this unit was that even after I "turned it off" it wasn't really "off" and does strange random self-wake-ups for no apparent reason at all. I loathe devices that sit in "hibernation" mode for the electricity-leeches that they are... and this unit seems to have FOUR power states - Fully Functional, Sleep, Deep-Sleep (which is where it goes when you 'turn it off', and Fully Powered Down - which it only achieves when, in confused and frustrated rage, you rip the power cord out of the wall. But maybe that's only an issue for me - you, dear reader, can decide for yourself. The only other quirk is that for a printer with fewer moving parts, it's quite loud when it's going hammer-&-tongs.

Overall, if you run a small home-based business and need to spit out a raft of documents in a hurry, this is an excellent and affordable investment. Yes, you can find cheaper, but they won't be as good. Similar quality machines on the market don't come with the same low price tag or upkeep costs. It's a trade-off you need to decide on for yourself, but it's certainly a machine that I am pleased to have in the office for when I need to print something fast before I dash out the door, or need to scan-&-send without faffing about on the PC.