Digital Trends

HP OfficeJet 7410 July 5th, 2006 | by Brandon King

Setup and Initial Impressions

Though the price of the 7410 is high for a printer at around $500, the included contents are beyond compare. The printer itself is bulky, but not unmanageable, and in addition to this you will find a 250 sheet paper tray, duplex attachment, various shelves (for catching printed pages and the document feeder), USB/phone/power cords, several CDs of drivers and software, and several instruction manuals and quick start booklets. The first 30 minutes of owning a 7410 will be consumed by removing the nearly 40 million pieces of tape used to secure various parts of the unit during shipping! Sure, that's an exaggeration, but we stopped counting at around 20 and continued to find more as we installed ink cartridges and other components.

Setup is relatively straightforward. If you are planning to use the built in 802.11b functionality, make sure you set up the 7410 close to your router and computer, as initial setup is easier over a wired network. Following the included instruction manual is a MUST, as straying from it will set defaults difficult to access. You can choose to connect through USB, another computer, Ethernet, or 802.11b. We figured the wireless connection would be the best test for unique/bug prone features, and chose that route. To configure for wireless access, it is best to perform the initial setup via an Ethernet connection. Once that is working, the SSID, IP address, and authentication method can be set directly on the unit itself using the bright, beautiful color LCD. The 7410 supports unencrypted, WEP, and WPA-PSK schemes; and we found no difference in transfer speeds or stability between the three. Installing drivers took close to ten minutes. When completed, a new icon appears in the taskbar area. This allows quick access to the greatly improved HP Director program, which permits access to most common functions.

During setup, drivers for the integrated card reader are installed. The 7410, like all other 7X10 models, has a built in 9-in-1 card reader, which is still accessible over the wireless network connection. Cards appear under a single drive icon in Windows Explorer, under My Computer. Transfer over the wireless connection is approximately ten times slower than a directly connected USB 2.0 card reader, such as the one integrated into the Dell 2405 and 2407 LCD monitors, but card access isn't the reason for the slots. The 7410 can print directly from memory cards or USB connected devices. Our initial reaction was that this was a gimmick feature, but it turned out to be more useful than we expected. The built in photo abilities allow for printing of a proof sheet and review of photos on the built in LCD. We tested the 7410 with a 4GB 80x CompactFlash card, using images captured at 8 megapixels. Once the proof sheet is printed, you can bubble in the slides you want to print, along with the print sizes, just like a ScanTron test. Put the sheet into the scanner portion and voila! Custom prints! HP has done an excellent job of making photo printing idiot proof.