Gadget of the Week: HP PSC 1350 All-in-One

This is the first of many Gadget of the week’s I will be posting. What I’ll do is take a different gadget that I use and blog about it every week. Simple no?

This week’s gadget is my HP PSC 1350 All in one printer, scanner, copier. It prints, it scans, and yes…it copies but one thing that it’s predecessors of it’s kind didn’t do is import images into your computer from any flash card type available.

Another hefty feature is that it can print your photos without a computer and without a screen! You’re probably wondering “No screen? How does it do that?” Put your mind at ease. I’ll tell you. Simply hit the button that looks like a camera and it prints a sheet of thumbnails and sizes. Fill in the bubbles, place the paper on the scanner and Walla! It prints them in full quality! When I tried this the first time I was astounded. Of course it uses a little bit of ink to make the page but if you didn’t have a computer handy and needed to print some photos, this is how you’d do it.

Printing

Of course one of the best thing this printer does is print. It can print on
Paper (plain, inkjet, photo), envelopes, transparencies, labels, cards, HP premium media, and iron-on transfers. Tha’s quite a list but there’s more! The size of paper it can print on are Letter, legal, executive, cards, and A2. But enough lists! It uses 2 ink cartridges for color and B & W.

Speeds are pretty good. A black and White pages are as fast as 17 per minute. Good for when you need to quickly photocopy something. Color is a different story. This printer can spit out a really great picture on photo paper…if you have 5 to 6 minutes to wait for it. This all depends on the size of the image. The settings for printing images are endless but the best resolution takes a while for a full 8 1/2 x 11 page (the highest dpi ‘dots per inch’ being 1200×1200)

Scanning

Okay, let’s venture into the paperless world with the scanning part of my blog post. This thing could take a flea on your fingernail and magnify it to fit a 30″ Apple Cinema Display…as long as you have the memory to do so. This all in one will chew up and spit out your RAM if you’re not to careful. “By saying chewing up and spitting I mean your computer will freeze up.”

However, if you have the memory and time you will get a very clean and precise image. It does have resolution of 19,200 dpi and 256 levels of grayscale. Speed is manageable but just like printing, scanning times depend on the resolution.

Copying

Finally, putting both of them together, we get Copying. Just like printing full B & W pages are 17 pages per minute. Color pages are at 12 pages per minute. The highest resolution for copying is at 1200 x 1200. That is a very good resolution for copying. Way more than what I use it for copying. I can’t tell the difference at the normal setting “which is much lower”.

Over all

This All-in-One is a perfect fit for me. I use it mainly to print school assignments or copy worksheets for study guides but it does it’s job and does it well. If you see this on ebay or have found it somewhere and are looking for a nicely priced printer, scanner, copier then I recommend it to all.