HP Officejet 6310 All-in-One Printer/Fax/Scanner/Copier (Q8061A#ABA)

I bought this as a replacement for my old Photosmart P2350 printer, which was good, but didn't have a fax machine. The Office Jet 6310 does, and the price was right, so I got it.

This is a straightforward multifunction (4-in-1) office machine. What's good about a 4-in-1 is that it does 4 things in one! The 6310 has a fax machine with built in 33.6kbps modem, a color scanner, copier, and printer. The fax machine has an auto document feeder, which is nice for sending multiple pages. Up front is a panel for the various functions; scanning, faxing, and copying. There's an alphanumeric pad for faxing, and a backlit LCD dot-matrix display. You can hook this printer up to a home network. There are slots for memory cards also. There's an Ethernet cable port in back, so it's network compatible. I have mine hooked up to my home wireless network through a router, and it works fine.

HP says this will do 33 pages per minute black and white and 25 color. Obviously it's an exaggeration, because it depends on the print quality. A fast draft print will come close, but for anything else, forget it. I'd get good color prints in over a minute on the maximum DPI. It uses print cartridges quickly also. I burned through a color and a back and white in a couple months of light use. HP cartridges are expensive and rarely go on sale.

This does print great photos, although not as good as a dedicated photo printer like the PhotoSmart series. The Canon Pixima 4-in-1 series machines do the best job, but were a lot more expensive. Black and white, text comes out clean and sharp, but not as sharp as a laser machine. The scans come out good, but expect to wait for them. Same with copies. Scanning and copying are both painfully slow with the 6310. Other machines do much better, and the higher end HP 4-in-1's perform all these tasks quickly.

Overall, this is a good machine for light use or occasional use. It would be best for someone who needs to send an occasional fax, scan, or copy something. It does everything I ask it to, and does it good enough.

Pros:

Low price
HP quality
readily available ink cartridges
Quick printing
Good print quality
Network ready
Multi-card reader
Auto document feeder

Cons

Slowish print speeds
Painfully slow scanning and copying
Expensive ink cartridges
Photo printing could be better

I hate this printer with a fiery passion. I fantasize about running it over with my car - that's how much of a hassle it has been.

The Good (and the reason I gave 2 stars instead of 1):
1. Color copies are crisp and look good - especially with a higher quality paper.

The Bad:
1. The scanner makes me insane. It is so slow I could send my document more efficiently via pony express. It also randomly doesn't work some days - particularly after scanning multi-page documents.
2. HP customer 'support' is so bad it's like a comedy routine about outsourced customer support. If you need help, plan to devote a few hours on the phone to HP 'support', and plan to go through long checklists that are unrelated to your problem. The last 2 times I called with a question their solution was to unplug the unit and leave it unplugged for a few days and try again.
3. The fax is slow and sometimes unreliable.
4. Like others, I was annoyed that I needed to buy my own USB cable - and the first one I bought didn't work with this printer (though it works with other things) - I had to get another.
5. The set-up. I may not be a pro but I am hardly a tech novice - I have a home office and have used several different all-in-ones in the past. This is the first time that installing a printer caused me so much trouble (including buying multiple USB cables and calling HP 'support' twice).

Also, and I can't count this as a negative since it is stated, be aware that this unit does not copy wirelessly unless you have an Ethernet connection/card.

Bottom line: Hours upon hours of hassle and frustration make this unit not worth it at any price.

Worked well for two weeks. Yes the software uses tons of disk space. Now after 2 weeks the paper handling is impossible. Every page ruined. Apparently one of the pick up wheels is inoperative or slow. I have been unable to fix this. HP support not any help, a waste of time, all one gets is frustration.

I put this one back in the box and bought a MX310 at Fry's with a 2 year full replacement warranty. Total price taxes and all was not much more than the $99 on Amazon. I loved earlier HP's but once burned is a warning to me. It looks like Canon is my new brand. Not as many freatures as the HP for the price, but it works great.

I had high hopes for a brand like HP, and have been soooo disappointed. Printing, scanning and copying are slow, ink runs out fast, paper is tricky to load, you must leave the machine on ALL THE TIME in order to receive faxes, rollers pull two pages at once to print (a lot of waste), It does make great looking copies, however.

Great product for the price. Ink cartridges especially for black could be bigger and hold more ink. Other than that, love it.