Digital Trends

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

Performance and Testing

Printing

There isn't much to write in regard to the ability to print from the 7410. The printer handled everything we threw at it with ease. Whether 30MB PDF files, Word documents, or pictures, print quality was between good and very good. Print times run pretty much as advertised, clocking in at 30ppm black, and 20ppm color when set to draft quality. Higher quality black printing can take up to 2.5 minutes per page when set to maximum. Text quality is particularly exceptional, with high resolution photos faring well, but sub-par to other dedicated photo printers. The 7410 does offer duplex (double-sided) printing, an option generally reserved for middle-to-high end laser printers. One catch though: when printing on both sides, there is a 15-30 second pause after the first side in order to allow the ink to dry. Otherwise, the rollers that feed the sheet would smear the ink. This considerably slows printing times, which average 20 seconds, depending on the amount of ink used.

Print times (in seconds)

The 7410 uses three color technology, yielding exceptional photo printing results. You get approximately 800 pages black and 450 color sheets before replacing the carts. Calibration is performed automatically by printing out a test sheet, and then scanning that sheet. We experienced no memory errors, stutters, or other problems with the various printing tasks thrown at the 7410, which was a relief!

Scanning

Scanning did not perform as well as printing. While the quality of color scans was very good, software bugs remained. The optical resolution maxes out at 2400dpi, and 19200dpi with interpolation. Scanning of the wireless connection was seamless, and we had to actively remind ourselves that there was indeed no direct connection. However, when scanning documents into Adobe Acrobat, we regularly encountered errors and crashed the 7410 once. Also, the automatic resizing skewed documents, and was an overall headache. In desperation, we used the built-in scanning program that saved documents as multi-page TIFs, which we later converted to PDFs in Acrobat. After a little finessing, we were scanning 30-50 double sided pages completely unattended. We tried to jam the 7410, and succeeded a couple times with horribly mangled pieces of notebook paper. However, this printer earned our respect as one tough cookie to jam. The sheet feeder is limited to 8.5” wide, and the glass top allows for legal sized pages to be scanned in one pass.

We tried scanning directly into Adobe Photoshop CS as well. Both Adobe applications rely on the TWAIN drivers, which may be the culprit in our strange messages indicating the device was unresponsive, when it clearly was. In a couple cases we got the same error messages in Photoshop as in Acrobat. However, unlike Acrobat, which discarded any scanned information once the error occurred, Photoshop showed partially complete data. Once the process was tried 30 seconds later, everything appeared to function properly.

In total we scanned over 100 monochrome documents, and a couple dozen color pictures with satisfactory results and only a few ‘quirks' when using the included scanning utility (which is launched from programs using the TWAIN driver).