| Product: HP PSC 500 Printer/Scanner/Copier |
Company: Hewlett-Packard |
| Web: www.hp.com |
Phone: 208-323-2551 |
| Platform: Win95/98/NT |
SRP: US$400
Street Price: same |
Cred Rating: | Special Award: |
The Countess recolied in horror when she saw the huge box containing her new Hewlett-Packard printer/scanner/copier. Its bulk silently taunted her for days, insinuating: "I'm too much machine for your royal highness to set up on her own." Prodded by her cruel Street Tech taskmasters [We would *never* prod the Countess! -Ed.], she finally dove into the cardboard box, and within an hour, was scanning, tweaking photos and printing out Web pages with the best of them. Be not afraid, fare newbie: The HP PSC 500 is a gentle giant.
I love the ease of set-up and use, the speed, and near-silence. The main drawback is that this thing is *big*, even outside of the box. It's 11 inches high and almost 2 feet deep with paper tray extended.
The PSC 500 can print up to 9 pages per minute in black and up to 6.5 ppm in color. It can handle 600 x 600 dpi optical (and up to 2400 enhanced). It features 30-bit color and 8-bit grayscale (256 levels of gray). The color copier is a wonderful thing to have (especially in an all-in-one at this price). It can copy up to 5 cpm in black and 3 cpm in color. The copier includes all sorts of features that don't require a PC, such as creating wallet-size photos from one original, a copy from two combined originals, a super-zoom and more.
The documentation is straightforward, divided into three books: SetUp Guide, Basic Operations and Customer Care
Guide. Also included in the mammoth cardboard cube:
- Black and color ink cartridges
- Bi-directional parallel IEEE 1284C cable
- AC Power cord
- HP PSC 500 software on CD-ROM
- HP Scanning software
- Creative Photo Projects software
- Greeting Card software
- I.R.I.S. OCR software
- Product Tour
A "Printable Expressions" (PE) kit was part of the Greeting Card package.
This includes lush card stock and envelopes, and HP's PE website goes
another step by enlisting Sharyn Wolf, author of "How to Stay Lovers for
Life" (and several other relationship-building books). Ms. Wolf, a
"licensed psychotherapist practiced in the art of improving relationships
between spouses, parents and kids, siblings, lovers and even friends,"
helps turn you into a junior Hallmark card maker with such earth-shattering communication tips
as "don't discount the power of humor" and "sometimes a picture is worth
1,000 words."
Software installation was quick and dirty, requiring one disk and just a few
minutes. The color and black ink cartridges popped in easily. I installed
the I.R.I.S. OCR program (for text scanning) and was appalled to discover that it doesn't seem to be able to handle anything under 12-point type.
Since I won't be scanning printed material very much, this dissatisfaction is quite small. If you do plan a lot of OCR, you'll probably want to get a better recognition program. The thing that's most impressive about the PCS 500 is its speed. Mixed text and graphics pages print in seconds. I scanned in a color photo collage for a birthday card and the PSC 500 cogitated and printed it in less than four minutes.
The Countess's graphic prowess is even less substantial than
her technical chops, and yet, I rotated and cropped and lightened and darkened
like a bit diddler working for George Lucas. My birthday card looked pretty damn good!
Best of all, the PSC 500 purrs as quiet as an overfed cat lounging next to my
monitor. I'm sorry now I kept it in the box so long.
- Virginia Vitzthum [11/29/99]
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