We’ve seen plenty of Web-connected inkjet printer offerings HP in the past, but the LaserJet Pro 400 MFP M425dn is the first multifunction monochrome laser printer to get the ePrint and AirPrint networking treatment.

The M425dn features a generous 3.5-inch control panel that lets you scroll through the print, scan, and copy functions. Designed with the workforce in mind, it also features automatic duplexing to save you money on double-sided printing as well as an automatic power switch that flips to save energy in the office.

The HP LaserJet Pro 400 also gives users the ability to register the printer with the company’s ePrintCenter app store for use directly on the touch screen. The ePrintCenter is an online hub where you can view job history, change settings, add printers to your account, browse and install apps, and cancel print jobs. All of the extra applications are free, and HP breaks them down into categories within the app store: entertainment, home, kids, news/blogs, photo, and tickets. Each one promises to streamline the printing experience by offering shortcuts to your favorite coupons, news articles, weather reports, recipes, and so on.

The ePrintCenter also lets you set up an ePrint account for use with mobile devices like tablets or smartphones that don’t have a USB port to connect with a traditional printer. ePrint bypasses this issue by enabling you to send jobs directly to the printer using a unique e-mail address. With that address, you can print from virtually any device that can send out messages.

(Review by Justin Yu on CNET – Justin Yu covers headphones and peripherals for CNET. When he’s not scouring eBay for useless ephemera or eating hot dogs for breakfast, he spends his time making fun of Internet culture every morning on The 404 podcast.)

In the market for a new printer? With all the options and features, picking the right printer (for you) can be difficult. Here are 9 questions you should ask before buying your new printer. Hopefully they will help you find just the printer you need.

Question #1 – What category of printer do you need?
There are three categories of printers, with a few options in each category. They are:

1) General Purpose or Special Purpose – The vast majority of printers on the market are general purpose (they are good for doing a little bit of everything). Special purpose printers are designed to do specific things (photo printing, document printing, label printing). Figure out what purpose you need your printer to serve.

2) Home Use or Office Use – Where will you be using your printer? Home use printers are more likely to print photos. Office users will focus on printing text. Maybe you are a home office user. If so, get a multifunction printer.

3) Laser Printer or Inkjet Printer -  Laser printers are designed for text heavy printing. Inkjet printers are better for photos and graphics. What you print will determine what you need.

Question #2 – Do you need a single function or multifunction printer?

If all you want to do is print, go with a single function printer. If you would like the option to make copies, scan documents/images and fax, you are going to need a multifunction printer.

Question #3 – Do you need to print in color?

If the answer is yes, you are probably leaning toward an inkjet printer. If you answer no, then find yourself a laser printer.

Question #4 – How much space do you have for your printer?

Consider the size of the printer you are buying in relation to the amount of space you have to store it. Some printers are to large to put on your desk.

Question #5 – How are you going to connect?

In addition to USB ports, most printers now allow you to connect via an Ethernet connection or Wireless connection. The advantage of Ethernet and Wireless is that they allow you to add your printer to your home network. You can link all your computers to a single printer.

Question #6 – What kid of print quality do you need?

Print quality differs by the type of printer. Check the print quality for text, graphics, and photos separately. Just because a printer prints high quality text does not mean it will print high quality graphics and photos. Find a printer that produces high quality results for what you print.

Question #7 – How much speed do you need?

If you typically print 1-2 pages at a time, you probably don’t need a printer with a lot of speed. If you are printing documents with many pages, you are going to want a printer with a high print speed.

Question #8 – How much do you print?

Make sure you check the printer’s monthly duty cycle.The duty cycle the manufacturers recommended number of pages you should print each month. Each printer has a different duty cycle. Printing in excess of this number may cause your printer to wear out faster.

Question #9 – How much does it cost?

Be sure to check the total cost of ownership for any printer you are thinking about purchasing. You’ll pay a certain amount for the printer when you buy it, but remember you are going to need to buy cartridges in order to continue to use it. To get the total cost of ownership, calculate the cost per year for each kind of output (monochrome, color document, photo) by multiplying the cost per page for that kind of output by the number of those pages you print per year. Add the three amounts together to get the total cost per year. Then multiply that by the number of years you expect to own the printer, and add the initial cost of the printer. Compare the total cost of ownership figures between printers to find out which printer will be cheapest in the long run.

The $299 HP Officejet Pro 8600 Plus e-All-in-One printer is an updated version of the Pro 8500A Plus multifunction CNET reviewed last year. The flagship of HP’s workcentric inkjet line gets a performance makeover from the inside out, with improvements to the speed of the print engine and the texture of the 4.3-inch touch-screen display, and a sleeker chassis that hides fingerprints better than the previous version. The device also takes printing to the cloud with ePrint and an accompanying iOS application that make the Officejet Pro 8600A Plus an impressively resourceful printer. I recommend it for home offices and professional environments that need a dependable workhorse printer.

Design and features
The Officejet Pro 8600 Plus printer strips away the glossy veneer of the past and replaces it with a modern matte paint job that does its best to hide dust and fingerprints. It has a professional look that should easily fit into any office or home decor, though at 12.4 inches tall, 19.4 inches wide, and 18.9 inches, you’ll need to clear a sizable amount of space to fit its large chassis. The printer’s sides feature two indented handles that make it easier to carry around, although you won’t want to move it on a daily basis.

A single 250-sheet input tray protrudes 4 inches out of the front of the 8600 Plus and a 50-page automatic document feeder (ADF) resides on top. You won’t find a manual feed tray in the center console like you would on a laser printer, which might be irritating if you print on irregular media like heavy cardstock or nonstandard envelopes. If that’s the case for you, I recommend the HP LaserJet Pro 100 Color MFP, a capable Hewlett-Packard laser printer with similar all-in-one functionality (scanner, copier, fax, and printer).

On the other hand, if paper input capacity is a hindrance, HP also sells a version of this printer called the Officejet Pro 8600 Premium that comes with an extra 250-sheet paper tray, an additional set of ink cartridges worth $60, and a 50-sheet pack of HP Premium Glossy Brochure paper, priced for $14 in HP’s online retail store. By upgrading to the step-up Premium package, you’ll save about $50 on your overall consumables cost, and I recommend taking advantage of these savings up front if you plan to print lots of photos or graphic documents.

The HP’s ample 4.3-inch touch-sensitive color display makes navigating the print, copy, scan, and fax functions a breeze. The screen is the same size as the Officejet Pro 8500A Plus’ screen and the competing Epson WorkForce 840, but the WorkForce 840 surrounds its color LCD with a larger 7.8-inch touch panel that provides additional navigation buttons. The HP’s entire touch panel, on the other hand, resembles an iPhone on its side and measures 6 inches on the diagonal.

In the end, both printers do an admirable job of providing a simple and clear menu system for navigating their many functions. However, HP makes it easier than Epson to enter text thanks to a full QWERTY virtual keyboard; entering data such as a wireless password on the Epson requires scrolling through the alphabet for each letter and is akin to entering your initials for a high score in an old arcade game. This version of the display also has less mushy play between the outward-facing screen and the hard registration pad below it, so you’re less likely to mistakenly press a button. The screen still isn’t perfect–for some of the onscreen features I needed to repeatedly push the corresponding virtual icon until the action finally registered. With no way to recalibrate the screen in the settings page, you’re in for a frustrating experience until the printer gets it right.

In addition to using a direct USB connection (like most vendors, HP does not include a USB cable with the printer), you can set up the Officejet Pro 8700 Plus on your network via Ethernet or Wi-Fi. We tested the Wi-Fi connection and the process was easy; using the printer’s touch screen, we navigated through a few setup screens to find our network, quickly entered its password using the virtual QWERTY keyboard, and established a connection within a minute. Macs and PCs alike on our network were able to see the printer without the need to install any additional software.

Once you connect the printer to a wireless network, you can use HP’s AirPrint feature to print from any iOS device without an additional application. Using AirPrint, you can print out a photo from your iPhoto library by simply choosing the connected printer and hitting Print. You can’t adjust any print properties, however; and our Hipstamatic test photo printed with a portion missing on both letter-size paper and 4×6-inch photo paper.

In addition to AirPrint, the Officejet Pro 8500A Plus also features HP’s ePrint technology, which enables you to send jobs from any connected device to the printer using the uniquely assigned e-mail address. You can find this address using the control panel (Wireless > Web Services > Display Email). It’s a convenient feature, to be sure, but it comes with a few restrictions. For one, the printer must be on and also connected to your network. For another, it can’t print Web pages, although you can simply copy and paste the text into a document as a workaround.

Along with the standard Copy, Fax, and Scan options listed on the home screen of the Officejet Pro’s control panel, you get a fourth icon labeled Apps. Our test unit came preloaded with 21 apps that let you print new pages from outlets like the Financial Times, Yahoo, Reuters, and USA Today. Others from DreamWorks, Nickelodeon, and Disney let you print coloring pages, paper airplane templates, and other crafts. You can install additional free apps, but you must do so from HP’s ePrint Center Web site after creating an account.

The standard flat-bed scanner/copier measures 8.5×14 inches, meaning it can scan or copy letter- and legal-size documents. With its 4,800-dpi resolution, scanned and copied documents look crisp and sharp, and you can send scans to a PC, a memory card, a network folder, or an e-mail program. The duplexing autodocument feeder on top of the machine can also flip pages around for hands-free scanning of single and double-sided originals.

Performance
The HP Officejet Pro 8600 Plus registered similar scores to the preceding Officejet Pro 8500A Plus, with a slight bump in print speeds across all four output tests. Despite the improved engine, the Epson WorkForce 840 was still able to outgun HP in the presentation and plain black-text speed tests, albeit only marginally. You could easily mistake the excellent print quality of the HP Officejet Pro 8600 Plus for output from a laser printer. With solid lines in both color and black and white, and especially darkened grayscale prints, the documents are of high-enough quality that I wouldn’t hesitate to hand them out at a client meeting. Like the WorkForce 840, the Officejet Pro 8600 Plus exhibited impressively crisp photo output quality with bright, vivid colors and minimal blurring even in finer text sizes.

Service and support
HP backs the Officejet Pro 8600 Plus with a standard one-year warranty, which includes 24-7 toll-free phone support and live Webchat during weekdays. HP’s Web site also contains downloadable drivers, software, and manuals; e-mail tech support; FAQs; and a troubleshooting guide. You can return the product within 21 days of delivery.

Conclusion
HP succeeds again in building a classy, fast, reliable all-in-one imaging device for the business market, but I wouldn’t end my recommendation at the office door. With its spread of convenient connectivity features and cloud printing that includes ePrint and AirPrint compatibility, the affordable Officejet Pro 8600 Plus will earn its place as a solid performer in any environment that demands high-quality document and image prints.

(Review by Justin Yu on CNET – Justin Yu covers headphones and peripherals for CNET. When he’s not scouring eBay for useless ephemera or eating hot dogs for breakfast, he spends his time making fun of Internet culture every morning on The 404 podcast.)

This month we celebrate Earth Day, a day that asks all of us to think about sustainability and how we can lessen our impact on environment. The product choices we make, both at home and work, are very important. Have you ever take a minute to think about the effect printer ink can have on the environment? In all honesty, it has a toxic effect! The environmental impact associated with using your inkjet printer and the ink needed to print with are real. But, there’s good news, there are ways to help avoid the damaging effects printer ink can have.

Printer ink uses bio-derived renewable raw materials. This is just a fancy way of saying to produce printer ink we need to use materials that occur in nature. Given the proper amount of time these materials will reproduce themselves and we should have an endless supply. I stress the word “should” because in order to produce pritner ink (and other products) we harvest the naturally occuring materials at a rate that exceeds their ability to naturally renew themselves. We’re depleting our natural resources and giving no opportunity for repleneshment.

Petroleum (crude oil) is the most common component in printer ink. The majority of printer inks are petroleum based, and are thus not considered to be environmentally friendly. Petroleum is one natural resource that is being consumed at a rate that exceeds the rate nature can produce it, thus damaging the environment. Petroleum based inks relase Volatile Organic Compunds (VOC’s) in to the atmosphere. VOC’s are gasses that contain harmful chemicals which cause netative health effects. They are released in to the air as the printer ink dries on to paper.

Printer inks also have a high heavy metal (arsenic, cadmuim, chromium, mercury, lead, zinc) content. These damaging metals end up in our soil when printed pages end up in landfills. Printer inks absorb in to the paper they are printed on. When printed pages end up in landfills the paper decomposes and the heavy metals are released in the soil. Once in the soil there are many ways that the metals are damaging to the environment.

The good news is that the negative environmental impacts caused by printer ink can be minimized or avoided. There are alternatives to petroleum based inks. Soy or vegetable based inks are made from renewable materials with a maintainable repleneshment rate (there are also some environmental impacts here, but that’s another discussion). These inks have a VOC percentage of less than 5%.  Petroleum based inks have a percentage of 40-80%. The VOC level of any ink can be found on MSDS sheets produced by the ink manufacturer. IF possible use “lower grade” inks for the bulk of your printing. Ink manufacturers, in their quest to produce more “life like colors” and longer lasting prints have depended more on petroleum based inks to do so. The higher the quality of ink, the more VOC’s and heavy metals.

If you don’t feel you can lessen your environmental impact through printer ink, focus on the cartridge the ink is in. The plastic a cartridge is made from is petroleum based and contains heavy metals. When cartridges end up decomposing in landfills they release VOC and heavy metals. Properly disposing of an ink cartridge is easier and does just as much good, if not more, for the environment than changing the type of printer ink you use. Cartridge manufacturers and office supply stores all offer cartridge recycling programs. If you want to do some good for the environment and your community, find a local organization that collects empty printer cartridges. The organization will receive some money for recycling the cartridge to help fund their programs. If “reusing” is your thing, have your empty ink cartridge refilled. Once refilled you’ll be able to put it back in your printer and continue printing with it.

Printer ink and cartridges are hard on the environment, and can be very harmful. Fortunately, you have some choices! Take a minute and decide which way you would like to lessen your impact on the environment: Change the type of printer ink you use or recycle your ink cartridge. Both are easy changes that will help you lessen the negative impact on the environment.

Does a feeling of dread come over you when your printer gives you a low ink warning? It’s the sure sign that you need to head out (or online) and buy another printer cartridge. Do you feel like you are always running low in printer ink?

Before you replace the cartridge that is low on ink, here’s a secret your printer manufacturer doesn’t want you to know.  A way to avoid getting cheated by your ink cartridge.

Most inkjet cartridges have a circuit board on them (see image above). The circuit board has a small amount of memory that keeps track of the amount of ink within the cartridge. Unfortunately, and more often than not, the memory is not very accurate. Here comes the cheat! For some reason it always reads that there is less ink in the cartridge than their actually is. What can you do to make sure you get as much ink as possible out of the cartridge? Reset the cartridge memory.

Find the circuit board on your cartridge. Often its brown or green in color with black, white, or gold circuits. Just above the circuit board you will see a small hole. Press a paper clip inside the hole (see image below) and the memory on your cartridge should be reset. Put the cartridge back in your printer and your ink level monitor should now give you a more accurate reading.

The next time your printer tells you the cartridges are low in ink, avoid getting cheated and try to reset your cartridge’s memory.

A quick disclaimer – This tip was supplied by the folks at BRUSSPUP. After watching and doing some research I cannot guarantee the tip will work, but it does seem to be a valid option for those of you with Epson cartridges. Cartridges by other printer manufacturers don’t seem to have the same hole above the circuit. After studying various Epson cartridges, it seems only new model cartridges have this capability. If you test this tip out, make sure you come back and let me know how it works.

Inkjet printers have a dirty little secret. Some might say this secret is a plan by the printer manufacturers to help you waste printer ink. Others will say this secret is a necessity that helps keep your printer in top running condition. What’s the secret? It’s the waste ink reservoir.

In the base of the inkjet printer is a large, absorbent, sponge/foam type material with a hole in it. The hole corresponds with a hole (in your printer) at one end of the printer cartridge arm path. You’ll also find another hole, leading to another reservoir, at the opposite end of the printer cartridge arm path.You wouldn’t know either hole is there unless you take your printer a part. If you remove the sponge/foam material you will find the waste ink reservoir. You will also find a varying amount of ink in the reservoir. The amount of ink depends on how long and often you have been printing with your printer.

How did the ink get there? The only way a printer can keep its jet nozzles clean is to squirt ink through them. Since the ink moving through the nozzles is not ending up on paper, the ink has to go somewhere. That somewhere is in the waste ink reservoir. For most, the upsetting part about this is that your printer decides when to squirt the ink through the nozzles and it typically happens whenever you turn the printer on. Printer owners don’t like the idea of needless ink usage (ink that does not end up on paper).

Printer manufacturers say that nozzle cleaning is essential to your printer functioning properly and the amount of ink used in the process is minimal.

Dirty secret or necessary evil? You decide.

Want to see what the ink reservoir and sponge/foam material looks like? Check out this video from Atomic Shrimp – The Dirty Little Secret Of Inkjet Printers

The year 2012 is going to be a good one for printers. While printing technology will (most likely) not change, printer manufacturers will be adding mobile printing via Wi-Fi and cloud printing via email to all the printer models they release in 2012. This technology will allow printers to follow their users away from their desks and on to their smartphones, tablets, and other mobile devices.

Gone are the days where we must be using a computer sitting next to a printer to print anything. Now we’ll be printing from just about anywhere we want, to any printer we want. Get ready to embrace mobile printing and cloud printing.

In 2011 Apple, Google, HP, and Lexmark all introduced mobile and cloud capabilities in their printers and services to enhance our printing capabilities. Google’s Cloud Print App lets users print via email on any printer connected to a computer that has Internet access. Apple introduced AirPrint, which lets you use Wi-Fi to send a variety of print jobs directly from an iOS device to any nearby AirPrint compatible computer. HP unveiled ePrint, a service allowing you to email a print job from anywhere to an ePrint compatible HP printer. Lexmark’s SmartSolutions apps allowed users to display a limited amount of web based information on their printer’s LCD screen.

In 2012 we will see these manufacturers expand their mobile and cloud print offerings while others begin to get in the game. Canon, Epson, and Kodak will all release printers, this year, that are mobile and cloud print enabled. Canon’s printers will offer Easy-PhotoPrint (for printing from Android and Apple phones and tablets) and PIXMA Cloud Link (for printing from Google Docs and Gmail from your mobile device) apps. Epson will will release the same type of printer apps under the name Epson Connect.

Kodak will following suit, but has chosen to focus on the size of the email message users can send to their printers. As of now, mobile and cloud printing apps only accept print jobs of a certain size. I imagine other printer manufacturers will follow Kodak and over the course of 2012 we will see less limited size constraints.

If you are in the market for a printer this year, definitely make sure you check out mobile and cloud printing apps before buying. They promise to be a very useful technology.

The HP Photosmart Premium C410a is of average size for a midgrade MFP, measuring 11.1 inches high, 18.4 inches wide, and 17.8 inches deep. It features one 125-sheet paper tray with a 20-sheet photo paper tray above it. In comparison, the Epson WorkForce 840′s 500-sheet paper tray offers four times the capacity for busy offices that cycle through more prints.

The Photosmart Premium C410a’s main paper tray can hold up to legal-size paper, and the small photo tray can hold up to 5×7 paper. A busy, high-volume office will constantly need to refill the 125-sheet paper tray, but it’s highly convenient for home users to have a dedicated photo tray that saves the hassle of manually loading photo paper when alternating between document and snapshot photo prints.

On top of the printer, you’ll find a 50-sheet auto-document feeder (ADF) that lets you slide in a stack of sheets for hands-free scanning, copying, or printing. The Photosmart Premium C410a also features automatic duplexing that can print on both sides of a single sheet of paper, and a button on the printer’s control panel lets you easily toggle between single- and double-sided printing.

The Photosmart Premium C410a bucks the touch-screen trend, serving up a control panel littered with physical buttons. The control panel runs nearly the entire width of the printer with ample room for an organized button layout. A small, 2.4-inch status LCD sits on the left side of the control panel. The panel sits fixed at an angle, but the color LCD can tilt forward for better viewing when you’re seated. To the left of the LCD on the front face of the printer are three media card slots (MemoryStick, SD, and CompactFlash) and a PictBridge USB port for direct printing from a compatible digital camera.

You’ll also notice a button labeled “Print Photos” in addition to the usual buttons to initiate scans, copies, and faxes. When you attach a USB device or insert a media card, the printer will scan the drive or card for photos that you can view on the LCD and scroll through using the arrow buttons. You can also select the photos you’d like to print, perform a few basic edits if you so desire (though the small screen makes it very difficult to see how your edits affect the image), and hit the Print Photo button to output your project. Finally, the convenient automatic paper sensor will automatically draw media directly from the photo paper tray.

Installing the printer is no more complicated than installing the software and drivers from the bundled CD, and then connecting the printer to your PC or Mac using a USB cable. You’ll need to supply your own for a direct connection as HP leaves it out of the box. The C410a also features Ethernet and Wi-Fi networking, and we connected it wirelessly on the printer by stepping through the setup screens, clicking on our preferred Wi-Fi network from a list, and entering our password.

You need no additional apps to print from an iPhone once you have the printer synched up to a wireless network. It also works with the iPad and iPod Touch, although we didn’t test with these devices. HP calls this functionality AirPrint, and it’s incredibly slick. Without the need to visit Apple’s App Store, we were able to print directly from our iPhone. We printed out a photo from our iPhone photo library by simply choosing the printer, and hitting Print. You can’t adjust any print properties, however, which resulted in some clipping on a square Hipstamatic photo using both letter-size paper and 4×6 photo paper.

In addition to AirPrint, the printer also features HP’s ePrint technology, whereby you can e-mail the printer an attachment to print out. To set it up, hit the ePrint button on the Photosmart Premium C410a’s control panel and it will print out a welcome sheet with a code that you then must enter on HP’s ePrint Web site. The code then becomes the e-mail address like so: code@hpeprint.com. ePrint is a convenient feature, but it comes with a few restrictions. For one, the printer must be on and also connected to your network (you select whether anyone can e-mail print jobs to your printer or only those to whom you grant access). For another, it can’t print Web pages, although you can simply copy the Web text into the body of an e-mail to get a similar page.

The printer also features HP’s print apps, which let you print pages from outlets such as Financial Times, Yahoo, Reuters, USA Today. Others from DreamWorks, Nickelodeon, and Disney let you print coloring pages, paper airplane templates, and other crafts. You can also install additional free apps, but you must do so from HP’s ePrint Center Web site after creating an account. It would be infinitely easier to simply download them directly to the printer. Also, the apps are much more useful on a printer with a larger LCD display.

The flatbed scanner/copier measures 8.5 by 11.7 inches, meaning it can scan or copy letter-size documents but not legal sheets. It features a 4,800 dpi resolution, and scanned and copied documents looked crisp and sharp. You can send scans to a PC, a memory card, or a USB drive. There is also an option for scanning photos to whatever paper you have in the photo tray. The front-right corner is used to align material to be copied or scanned, which is easier than other printers that make you align your pages or photos in the back-left corner. Unlike the Lexmark Pinnacle Pro901, however, the Photosmart Premium C410a’s hinges do not detach, which is inconvenient when scanning or copying pages from thick textbooks.

The Photosmart Premium C410a employs a five ink-tank system (yellow, cyan, magenta, and two black cartridges). High-yield black cartridges (564XL) cost $17.99 for a rated 750 pages, and high-yield color ink cartridges (564XL) cost $22.99 for a rated 550 pages. Working with these figures, monochrome pages cost 2.4 cents a page, and color pages cost 4.1 cents a page. These numbers are roughly average for an inkjet, though the Lexmark Pinnacle Pro901 uses high-yield black ink cartridges that cost only $4.99 and deliver monochrome prints at less than a penny per page. The Pinnacle Pro901 also boasts a low 3.2-cents-per-color-page figure.

Performance
In lab testing, the HP Photosmart C410a proved itself an above-average performer across all four of our speed tests among multifunction printers (MFP) in its price range. On our speed tests, it produced just over eight pages of monochrome text, four pages of color graphics, and just over six PowerPoint slides per minute. Those speeds trailed the performance of the Epson WorkForce 840, our Editors’ Choice for this category, but outpaced similarly priced MFPs such as the Lexmark Pinnacle Pro901. It also clearly outclassed an entry-level, two-tank MFP, the HP Photosmart D110a, which shows the performance you gain as you scale up HP Photosmart line.

The Photosmart C410a also produced 1.35 4×6 photos per minute; we think anything over 1 4×6 photo per minute is respectable, and even the highly rated WorkForce 840 failed to hit that mark.

The Photosmart C410a’s speed does not come at the expense of quality. It produced crisp, dark black text, which was clearly superior to the Lexmark Pinnacle Pro901′s text quality. Color graphics and photos exhibited accurate colors, though we found that copies of photos, come out slightly blurry. That said, we recommend simply reprinting a photo from its digital source if you need another copy.

Service and support
HP backs the Photosmart C410a with its exclusive enhanced support services: a dedicated toll-free number, troubleshooting over online chat with an HP expert, and a one-year warranty that guarantees repairs with “Next-Day Business Turn Around” and offering brand-new replacement units for the first 30 days after purchase.

In addition, HP offers an added Accidental Damage Protection and a Pick-Up-and-Return program that sends an authorized courier to pick up your failed equipment and deliver it directly to an HP-designated repair facility.

You can find more warranty information by visiting the HP Support Web site that also features online classes, FAQs, driver downloads, and troubleshooting tips, as well as a new shopping buddy that puts you in a chat room with an HP sales rep so you can ask questions before you buy.

Conclusion
For a home office that needs copy, scan, and fax functions, the HP Photosmart Premium C410a offers crisp speeds and output. Its low-capacity paper tray limits its appeal for high-volume offices, but HP’s ePrint and AirPrint features make it a worthwhile option for home users.

(Review by Justin Yu on CNET – Justin Yu covers headphones and peripherals for CNET. When he’s not scouring eBay for useless ephemera or eating hot dogs for breakfast, he spends his time making fun of Internet culture every morning on The 404 podcast.)

A little something for those holiday do-it-yourselfers – Print your own holiday cards! If you are having trouble finding just the right way to convey your holiday wishes this year, why not print your own holiday cards. You can find many card templates online. All you have to do is fill in the blanks and print. If you ae good with graphics you can design your own card. Here are three things you’ll need to make sure your cards look good.

Tip # 1 – Pick the right paper
The secret to printing a great looking holiday card is to make sure you get the right paper. Make sure you get greeting card paper stock. Ideally you’ll get something that is 14 point gloss cover stock (if printing a photo on your card). If you have a speciality paper store in your area, ask them what they think is best. You can often get envlopes with the card stock. Buying card stock and envelopes together will save you some money.

Tip #2 – Check your printer settings
Before printing your holiday cards, make sure you update your printer settings. For the best looking card you will want to set your printer to print with maximum dpi (highest quality print quality setting). Once you’ve updated your printer settings, print a test card to make sure everything looks good. If you are happy with the test print, start printing the cards you want to send.

Tip #3 – Make sure you have enough printer ink
Make sure you have some spare printer ink cartridges. Using a high print quality setting will require more ink. Depending on the number of cards you are printing you may need to use a few cartridges.

The good: Canon’s new imaging suite with HD Movie Print, automatic photo filters, Pixma Cloud Link printing, and an integrated disc labeler all make the Canon Pixma MG5320 more useful for amateur photographers.

The bad: The printer lacks an Ethernet port for wired networking, and with no high-yield cartridges available, consumables can get pricey.

The bottom line: We recommend the Canon Pixma MG5320 and its photo-friendly features for amateur photographers shopping for a do-most-of-it imaging device, but the step-up Pixma MG6120 is a better fit for multiuser offices.

The Canon Pixma MG5320 printer encourages families, work groups, and individuals to print creative photos with the help of new software features like HD Movie Print, fun photo filters, and Pixma Cloud Link. Still, we have a few complaints. The printer doesn’t have an Ethernet port so you have to connect to Wi-Fi for network printing, and with no high-yield ink cartridge option, the cost of replacing all five standard-size inks can get out of hand. Despite those caveats, the MG5320 earns our recommendation for competent performance in our speed and quality tests, and the extras you get for $150 offset its connectivity shortcomings.

Design
The Pixma MG5320 has a thinner silhouette than we’re used to seeing from Canon, incorporating a unique design with folding trays to reduce its overall footprint. The printer measures 17.8 inches wide, 14.5 inches deep, and just under 7 inches tall with the paper trays folded up. At 18.3 pounds it weighs less than its beefier linemate, the Pixma MG6120, due to the rear-mounted, 150-sheet autodocument feeder (ADF) and the five internal ink tanks. With those specs, it should be relatively easy to transport around the home or office.

The MG5320 also costs $50 less than the MG6120 because it doesn’t feature a touch-screen panel. We actually prefer the additional hard buttons on the control panel, as they make it easier to rapidly locate the necessary buttons to access a job. The top of the printer is home to the one-touch copy, scan, and print buttons, but you also get a tactile home button and a circular dial that clicks as you scroll through menus on the 3-inch LCD screen. You can adjust the brightness level of the display by navigating to the settings menu, and the screen can be tilted forward and backward to achieve your desired viewing angle.

The 150-sheet paper trays that fold out of the top and bottom of the MG5320 allow horizontal and vertical movement to accept a range of paper sizes from 4×6-inch snapshots all the way up to legal-size sheets. The 300-sheet overall capacity means you can store standard paper in the bottom tray and photo paper in the ADF, and a paper sensor inside automatically knows which one to grab depending on your job. The trays themselves are made of a light plastic that feels easy to break; we worry about their durability.

Setting up the printer is simple no matter how you choose to connect it to a computer, and the installation disc provides onscreen instructions guiding you through two options: 802.11 b/g/n wireless, or a simple USB cord. Most printers in this range also include an Ethernet port for wired networking in small offices, but Canon omits this key feature from the MG5320 so it can pull an extra $50 from your wallet if you opt instead for the $200 MG6120. Regardless, this won’t be an issue if you’re planning to use the printer at home or with a single computer.

USB setup is standard for printers and the instructions are easy to follow, and the same is true of Wi-Fi installation. If you have a wireless router with a Wi-Fi Protected Setup (WPS) button, all you have to do is press the button and it’ll automatically connect the Pixma MG5320 to your network without your needing to input your username and password. Otherwise, make sure you have that information handy.

From here, you can select either Easy Install for straightforward help, or Custom Install if you want to sort through which extra features you want–these include Easy-PhotoPrint EX for managing digital photos, MP Navigator EX to guide you through the scanning process, and Pixma Cloud Link, which lets you print directly from the Canon Image Gateway portal or a Picasa account. Keep in mind that you’ll need more free storage space on your hard drive if you go with the comprehensive Easy Install.

Once installation is complete, Windows users will notice several new buttons displayed above the taskbar on the lower right side of the screen. These shortcuts are designed to give you quick access to five of the most commonly used printer functions: Scan a Document, Layout Print, Photo Print, Show Main Screen, and Hide Toolbar.

The MG5320 also includes Canon’s HD Movie Print feature, which lets you pull still snapshots out of videos shot with compatible Canon HD video cameras. We tested the printer with a top-flight Canon PowerShot S95 handheld camera and were impressed with the Canon Solution Menu EX software’s step-by-step instructions.

With the software you can also edit video images and prepare a moving clip for grabbing still shots from the video. It’s as simple as selecting a video snippet and either capturing a group of 10 frames or hitting the “capture” button to select single images. After that, you can edit an image to reduce noise and sharpen it, and although the SD95 is only capable of 720p video resolution, the software supports true 1080p digital SLR cameras like the Canon EOS 5D Mark II. When that’s finished, you can even print custom disc and jewel-case labels using the multipurpose tray installed just above the paper input tray, and you can personalize them using templates accessible through the software suite.

Finally, Canon’s new HD Movie Print tool lets you combine multiple still frames from a video into a single snapshot image–for example, you can merge all your golf stroke positions into one photo. The lid of the MG5320 lifts to reveal the five-ink cartridge bay for cyan, magenta, yellow, and black ink tanks, and there’s another high-capacity pigment black cartridge inside that only draws ink when you toggle the monochrome mode within the driver preferences.

This should extend the longevity of the smaller black cartridge since it only gets depleted in color print mode, and MG5320 users need all the cost savings they can get, as according to Canon the cost per page of each ink set is 5.2 cents per monochrome page and 13.4 cents for color. Those prices are significantly higher than the average cost for consumables, and the Canon Web store mysteriously does not sell high-capacity cartridges for this model.

Printing functions aside, the MG5320′s copy function has all the features you’d expect from a multifunction printer. You can enlarge the original copy up to 400 percent or fit the entire document to a page. Other options include two-sided copying, borderless copying, exact duplication, cropped copy, and two-on-one and four-on-one photo collages.

Scanning is also typical, with options to save the file straight to your PC, as an e-mail attachment, or scanned as a PDF, or to simply open it in an application. You can save all documents as TIFF, JPEG, bitmap, or PDF files, and the scanner now supports film and negatives as well. The negative and slide holders live under the document protector beneath the lid, and the scanner supports document sizes up to 8.5×11 inches. If you tend to scan at the highest resolution available, the MG6120 can reach 4,800×4,800 dots per inch (dpi).

Performance
We’re surprised at the disparity between the MG5320′s impressive text and presentation speed output and the time it took to print photos and pages of color graphics. It’s no match for the Epson WorkForce 610 and drops down to second place in the text page test with a respectable 8.11 pages per minute, then loses momentum and falls to near the bottom at a sluggish 2.06 pages of color graphics and 1.02 full-color photo snapshots per minute. Despite these polarizing speed test results, you’re unlikely to notice the differences as a consumer unless you’re printing consistently high numbers of pages of text or photos. Still, the MG5320 isn’t the best performer for busy offices, although we wouldn’t hesitate to flaunt its output quality in a boardroom presentation.

The Pixma MG5320 performed well in our quality examination, printing solid, dense text with fully formed characters down to 5-point font size. The color graphics test emerged solid and evenly distributed, but we did notice small portions with more neutral tones than the original, specifically in areas with gradual color gradients and skin tones. To confirm, we repeated the test in three iterations and the imperfections were consistent throughout, although unlikely to be noticed by most eyes. In most cases, snapshot photos came out with vivid coloration and even tones.

Service and support
Canon supports the Pixma MG5320 with a standard one-year limited warranty program that includes InstantExchange and a year of toll-free phone support. The product page for the printer features frequently asked questions, registration, recycling information, driver downloads, and other information.

Conclusion
The Canon Pixma MG5320′s slower print speeds are offset by useful photo printing tools like HD Movie Print, Pixma Cloud Link, disc printing, and dual paper trays that let you store up to 300 sheets at a time. In the future, we’d like to see Ethernet connectivity as well, but we would definitely recommend this printer to photo enthusiasts in need of a budget-friendly assistant.

(Review by Justin Yu on CNET – Justin Yu covers headphones and peripherals for CNET. When he’s not scouring eBay for useless ephemera or eating hot dogs for breakfast, he spends his time making fun of Internet culture every morning on The 404 podcast.)