HP Officejet Pro 3620 Black & White

It’s great for a home office, but keep your kids off it

Designed primarily for ‘home office and small office’ users, the 3620 is a black-and-white inkjet printer. It can print, copy, scan and also fax. Its features include network connectivity for sharing the printer on a local network using an Ethernet cable. If the local network is Wi-Fi enabled, one can also print from wireless devices with ease. It can also be connected to a PC using a USB cable.

What got me really excited is that with the 3620 you can get a printout from your iPad or your iPhone without a driver—whether a web page or book you were reading. HP also has an e-Print app that enables printing from an Android device. What is cooler is that both my Mac and Windows machines detected the printer automatically, installed the drivers on their own, and I just had to plug and play. The printer is quick and also delivers sharp prints.

You can also sign up for HP’s e-print facility where you can get an email ID for your printer, send it an email from anywhere in the world and it gets printed, a great fun way of sending documents in case you need to save time. Imagine working from a car and reaching home to have your printouts already there, without the help of a secretary.

The printer is also designed to save energy without sacrificing performance. It consumes up to 50 per cent less power than HP’s earlier models; the cost of the cartridges has come down and so you get prints at an economical cost; HP also has a high-capacity cartridge that can deliver up to 1,600 prints at the rate of 19 pages per minute; and with its built in duplexer, you can programme it to print on both sides of the paper.

But then there are some downsides. The printer still uses an external power adapter, which is something I have always disliked. The overall build quality is great, but the touch panel is rather too flimsy and I am sure the kids at home will manage to puncture it.

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