While the title PSC 2110 doesn't exactly roll off the tongue, HP's latest printing monolith occupies a curious niche; it's not quite as fully featured as the soon to be replaced PSC 950, but it is cheaper, putting it in a budget position, presumably aimed at businesses who don't need faxing or memory card reading features.

The PSC 2110 even looks like the PSC 950. The most obvious omission in the unit is the absence of the multimedia card slots that adorn the side of the 950. The other more subtle missing link is the absence of faxing capabilities. If you can live without both, the PSC 2110 retails for AU$200 less than the PSC 950, which itself will be replaced later this year by the new PSC 2210. In our review of the PSC 950, we felt the multimedia cards were a nice but hardly vital addition, and the faxing portion of the printer will be vital for some, and useless for others.

Setup of the PSC 2110 was much like any other HP printer; there's a large instruction sheet showing you what to plug in where, and when. We did hit one snag with the 2110 connecting to a certain Windows 2000 machine, although we're almost certain it wasn't the 2110's fault. It did give us the opportunity to swear a lot and eventually go to HP's support site, which we can't fault; nearly every problem you could have with a printer is detailed there, with solutions for just about every case -- except ours. To be fair, the 2110 worked flawlessly on every other Windows 2000 machine we tested it with.

The software offerings of the 2110 revolve around a central control utility that HP label as HP Director, which can also be used to run other HP digital image hardware. From Director, it's mostly idiot-proof to scan in images, perform Optical Character Recognition (OCR) to 'read' documents and print images in a variety of formats and page layouts. We did notice something of a performance hit when running HP Director, although there's nothing to stop you accessing the printer through software of your choice, or directly from the PSC 2110's control panel. For digital photography novices, the included photo correction software works acceptably well, although those with more savvy may choose to use more fully featured image packages.

Scanning speed was acceptable via the USB 1.1 port. There are faster USB 2.0 scanners out there, but for most SOHO uses the 2110 would be perfectly acceptable. The beauty of having an integrated scanner/printer unit is that it becomes a default copier as well, although it can't compete in speed terms with a dedicated copier unit, of course.

The 2110's OCR credentials were put to the test with a number of documents. We're yet to see a flawless, or even near flawless OCR implementation in a consumer MFD, but the 2110 produced at least legible text from our samples. You'd still need to do some editing before using the produced text elsewhere.

As part of HP's new lineup of printers, we were expecting reasonable quality from the PSC 2110 and to a large extent we were satisfied. In normal quality text mode we managed an average of 3 pages per minute after the initial page. Swapping over to 'FastDraft' mode we doubled that speed to 6 pages per minute, with a readable quality to boot. FastDraft lives up to its name; pages tend to shoot out of the paper tray with some force.

A full size A4 photo quality print took just over six minutes to print; that's not exceptionally fast, although the quality of the final print was good. If photo quality is of particular importance to you, you could opt for the dedicated HP #58 Photo cartridge, which enables six colour printing using HP's PhotoREt technology.

Specifications