HP's PSC 950 offers multifunctional printing capabilities for SOHO environments with a couple of unique image-based twists.
Multifunction devices are becoming the norm in the corporate world, where the savings that can be made are quite evident. In the SOHO environment, however, they're slightly more rare; the initial high cost is often more than small businesses can bear. HP's targeting exactly this market with the HP PSC 950, which offers a variety of standard MFD functions as well as a few enhancements aimed squarely at the home market.
Setting up the PSC 950 is much like any other printer. HP includes a handy setup poster that steps Mac and PC users through installation in a painless manner. The only step we faltered on was installing the black ink cartridge; for some reason it's rather stiff when first inserted. HP also gets a gold star from us for including a USB cable in the package; a step that far too many other printer vendors leave out.
The PSC 950 acts as a scanner, fax, and colour printer, and all in a unit with a surprisingly small footprint; not that much larger than the average colour photo printer. It prints at up to 2400x1200dpi, and as always, you'll get better results on photo paper than you will on plain. The SOHO market, however, won't splurge for glossy paper for everything they print, so we tested with a variety of papers and images. Black text was what you'd expect for a decent inkjet; you'll still get sharper results with a laser printer, but don't have to pay as much. For the market this is aimed at, that might dump a little colour into a document, or the occasional small image, the PSC950 works very well. We deliberately stretched the PSC 950's specifications by printing a high resolution image on glossy photo paper, and while it wasn't the best quality we've seen, it was perfectly acceptable.
One factor we did notice when printing images with the PSC 950 is that it doesn't always play well with other software. Printing from Photoshop and scaling to fit the paper within the application, we found that if the printer driver was also set to scale, images would end up being stretched over several pages for reasons we're still not sure of.
It's worth noting that if your small business still runs on older software, or relies on older packages, the PSC 950 might not be the printer for you; due to the USB connection model there's no support for Windows 95 or NT. The PSC 950 also doesn't support printing from DOS programs.
HP promotes the PSC 950 as a miniature photo lab, and with that in mind it supports several features geared towards digital photography. First and foremost are the slots on the right hand side of the unit that accept CompactFlash, SmartMedia and Memory Stick cards. Inserted cards can then be scanned, and images printed directly without an intermediate PC viewing step. If you've got plenty of shots, you can print proof sheets of selected images. This is a step where the PSC 950 uses its multifunction roots well. Proof sheets aren't just a way to preview images; by filling in the appropriate oval areas on the proof sheet and rescanning it, you can then set up print jobs based on your selection criteria. It's an extremely clever idea, although it will use up more ink than simply selecting the print job from your PC. The PSC 950's even set up to be somewhat idiot proof; it spotted us (deliberately) putting a CompactFlash card in backwards and noticed when we (inadvertently) put the proof sheet on the scanning bed back to front.
Scanning with the PSC 950 was reasonable; while the supplied PC utility is quite easy to use, the button layout on the printer itself is a little trickier to use. There's an easy logical flow of buttons for selecting printing and scanning and so on, but then there's an array of arrow buttons, options buttons and colour type buttons, and the key sequences aren't always crystal clear. Likewise, the array of buttons available for faxing may be perplexing for some, at least initially. Faxing isn't a strong point for the PSC 950; all faxed pages must be manually scanned one at a time, so if you regularly fax multi-page printed documents, look elsewhere.
HP PSC 950
Company: Hewlett Packard Australia
Price: AU$799
Distributor: Selected resellers
Phone: 13 13 47
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