In home offices, every square foot counts.
Multifunction peripherals and "All in One" peripherals (sometimes considered to be a distinct category, lacking a telephone handset), are popular with many home business or small business owners, who are looking for an inexpensive, space-saving alternative to separate machinery for faxing, scanning, printing and copying. Indeed, when you think about it, there is a lot of duplicated functionality between a plain-paper fax and a printer, or between a photocopier and a scanner. A multifunction peripheral/All in One (which we shall hereafter abbreviate as MFP and AIO, respectively), is designed to take advantage of these similarities to deliver a single, cost-effective solution to these common office needs.
Most MFP or AIO devices can be used as standalone devices for faxing and copying, but they really come into their own when attached to a PC. Under computer control, functions such as colour scanning, page printing and additional fax management options greatly add to the utility of an MFP or AIO device.
We've seen many variations in functionality among all-in-one peripherals. As noted earlier, MFPs typically include a telephone handset and tend to be fax centric; some AIO devices provide a flatbed scanning area not unlike that of a desktop photocopier and emphasize copying. However, the most common variety of AIO looks a bit like an overgrown printer, with a sheet-fed paper path. These devices, as you might guess, are focused on printing and, by extension, PC connectivity.
K80
Such a device is the HP K80. Selling for US$399, this machine incorporates a panel of ten speed-dial fax numbers and the other usual controls found on fax machines. The unit's built-in colour printing and scanning capabilities come into play here, too, allowing such intriguing possibilities as colour faxes, or scanned attachments to email messages. The specifications are impressive. It includes a 70-page fax memory, a 20-page automatic document feeder and provides automatic page reduction, redial and busy redial functions, along with enticing sounding enhancements such as a junk fax barrier,
However, there is something to be said for simplicity, too. When tested a K80 device, we happened to receive a French Canadian unit. Now, we're not proud to say that we are practically French illiterate, but if our experience with the K80 is any indication, it's not far from the truth. Simply put, we couldn't make head nor tail of many of the unit's functions. This unusual experience provided us with at least one useful insight: the buttons and icons on the K80 aren't particularly intuitive in their design. We couldn't figure out how to program the row of rapid dial buttons. We couldn't even figure out how to receive a fax from our Panasonic PC / Fax Store 40 -- a small "black box" device that allows your PC to receive faxes even when turned off. We use it to route faxes to various devices: our PCs, Macs or standard fax machines. It works perfectly with other fax machines we have tested it with.
There's a big green button on either side of the K80's LCD display, but these buttons do not signify "start" or "go" -- they are mode selectors for colour modes. An orange button on the unit signifies cancel. It sports an icon of a triangle inside a circle. Is that a universal symbol for stop? On our VCR, triangles usually mean Go. Well, at least the button is something close to red. It is, however, nowhere near the "start" button, nor is it near the pause button. Next to it, illuminated exclamation mark and telephone handset icons are completely devoid of text captions.
A button labeled Numériseur vers ("Scan to," we think that means), when pressed, displays various options on the unit's LCD display. One says OUTLOOK.EXE (what's with the .EXE extension?), others include Corel PHOTO PAINT 9, Microsoft Word and several other program names. Once we got it into SCANIRIS mode -- a PC-based optical character recognition option intended to turn scanned pages into editable text -- we couldn't get out of it without turning the power off. Obviously, there's got to be a way, but after pressing every button on the unit's front panel (there are 41 in total), we couldn't find one that did the trick. It doesn't matter what language you speak -- that's not good interface design.
The exclamation mark symbol began flashing orange, and the LCD began scrolling a message including the text "Appuyez sur Entrée pour continuer," which would seem to suggest that pressing the Enter key is the action required to continue. However, there is no Entrée key on the unit, and pressing Enter on our PC did absolutely nothing. Now, if you're French, you're probably laughing your beret off right now at these confessions, but we really think it suggests a fundamental problem with this unit. It's just not very intuitive. Another example: to print faxes stored in memory, you have to press Menu, 7 then 4. If you are going to invest in one of these devices, you'd better plan on investing some quality time with the manual as well.
RTFM
These issues are probably all easy to resolve by reading the fine manual, but we can't help but be reminded of the old fax machine hand-me-down we were attempting to replace with the K80. Our old fax was not much for fax quality or advanced functionality, but it was extremely obvious in its layout. There was one button much larger than all the rest. That was Start. There was one Red button; that was Stop. The only other colored button on the device was a Copy button. All of the telephone speed-dial and redial buttons were all in a row right next to numeric pushbuttons. Get the idea? At least for us, this old unit (a Brother, which came to us without a manual, too) was intuitive enough in its functionality that we could put it to work immediately.
So, if there's a lesson to be learned from our miserable failure to understand what is undoubtedly a sophisticated and highly functional MFP, it is to consider that simplicity is a virtue when it comes to machines designed to enhance your productivity.
Here's an English document in Adobe Acrobat PDF format describing the specifications of the K80. http://www.shopping.hp.com/shopping/pdf/c6750a.pdf
It's always useful to visit the product page of a manufacturer's website before purchasing a product. In the case of the K series page, you'll see some of the issues that have been resolved since the product's initial release or, possibly, gain insight into still unresolved problems. Since the launch of the K80, there have been patches released to address a variety of issues: a May 14 update fixes an inability for AOL users to send scanned attachments to non-AOL users. While the original bug more about weaknesses in the design of AOL than it does about the K80, it's worth noting. Also on the site is a patch for Windows Me users that resolves a problem with the TWAIN scanning feature.
The Tests
Assuming that you spend a few minutes learning how the various options of this unit work, you will be rewarded with results that justify the effort. The K80 uses the same ink cartridge and print head nozzle designs as the company's top-of-the-line DeskJet 900 series printers, reviewed elsewhere in this section.
Scanning, Printing & Copying
The K80's built-in scanner and printer produce copies of exceptional quality - the output of our "worst case scenario" test pages with huge areas of solid color closely resembled the originals, produced on a DeskJet 960cse. Indeed, the originals had a slightly mottled quality in the solid areas; the copies made at the "high" quality setting on the K80 smoothed this out to near-perfection. Fine details were preserved in everything except the palest of blues. The unit gets an "A" grade as a copier.
It's a sheet-fed scanner, so this makes it unsuitable for certain tasks, but the design of the unit is clearly fax centric, so HP's decision to use a mechanism of this sort is not surprising or, we think, inappropriate. The paper feed mechanism was entirely trouble-free.
And despite our quibbles noted earlier about some of the more advanced functions of the machine, it must be observed that most office users aren't going to care about them. The average person wants to be able to walk up to the fax machine, slide a couple of pages into the paper-feeder, punch in the fax number and hit "send." The K80 does this exactly as expected. And, if the receiving party has a colour capable fax (e.g., another K80) and you choose to hit the "colour fax" button, they'll receive a better-looking fax than most of us have ever seen.
PC Connections
But the unit really shines when connected to a PC. he K80 is designed for use with Windows NT (SP3 or later), Windows 9x/Me or Windows 2000. It does not support Windows 3.x, DOS or the Mac.
Indeed, Mac users have far fewer choice in MFP devices than Windows users. In fact, before July 1999, there were exactly none available for the Mac. Fortunately, Canon on May of that year announced the first Mac-compatible multifunction printer, and released it in July. The US$379 MultiPASS C635 features color printing, scanning and faxing.
The central control panel for the K80 is called Director. It provides an easy interface to the various functions the device is capable of, and uses a number of "wizard-type" step-by-step dialog boxes to help you configure the various features.
For example, the Fax Setup Wizard walks you through the necessary steps and decisions you'll have to make to configure a PC-based fax system. It allows you set up the OfficeJet to receive calls, share a line with a PC-based modem or answering machine, output PC-generated fax cover pages, specify a custom header for the top of your fax pages and send from or add to your PC address book. You can also preview faxes before you send them, and easily pull up a log to see which faxes have been sent -- and to where.
The OfficeJet Director provides the handy ability to see messages on your PC's screen exactly as they appear on the front-panel LCD on the unit. When faxing, for example, the status readout tells you whether the call went through, whether the recipient is capable of receiving in colour (if not, the OfficeJet automatically sends in grayscale instead), and so on.
The scanning function uses a driver that is TWAIN compatible. This allows the unit to be accessed directly though your favorite graphics applications, or, if you prefer, the Scan Manager supplied with the OfficeJet. With it, you can choose to scan pages as photos, editable text (which is produced via an integrated OCR function), text as images, or mixed images. The panel also provides links to pages of helpful tips for achieving better results and creative photo printing suggestions.
With the scan panel, you can perform various image manipulation functions. Although the scanning driver automatically crops and strightens images, you can rotate pages or manually correct brightness or colour balance, if you wish.
The Copy function provides several PC-based feature enhancements, too. You can apply a margin shift, reduce or enlarge, choose the quality at which you want to copy ("Best," as you can imagine, is a lot slower and uses more ink than "Fast" mode and, of course, choose the number of copies you wish to make.
There's also a "Custom Button" capability that allows you to define your own functions and assign them to buttons on the K80, or select them via the director Interface. You could, for example, create a button for your invoices that automatically selected "fast" printing mode and made two copies.
Conclusion
When reviewing products, we always try to consider how they will be used, and whether their value proposition makes them a worthwhile investment. We dig full-featured gear as much as the next geek, but we know many of our readers just want to get the job done. With that in mind, we think that our quibbles about the OfficeJet K80's front-panel complexities largely disappear when the unit is connected to a PC and accessed via the more friendly Windows-based interface. As a device intended to fulfill the task of color printing and copying, it deserves a nearly perfect score. We see no serious flaws with its fax-related functions, other than our inability (which may be a "user too stupid" type error) to figure out how to route a saved fax from a Fax Store type "black box" to the unit for printing. If you don't mind the fact that the scanner is sheet-fed, the K80 fulfills its promise as a full-featured "All in One" PC peripheral rather admirably.
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