HP Officejet 6310

...find it out on the HP website (assuming they have one. They probably do. I didn't care enough to find that out, either).


Anyway, what you really want to find out from a consumer review is whether your photocopier/printer-y type thing is secretly plotting in league with your modem to kill you to death as you sleep. Now, THAT'S the kind of question you'll find answered here.


I'll have a go at subheadings ...
...challenge in itself, mainly because HP thought the absolute optimum way to package it would be to swathe it in the very stickiest sellotape known to man, and that, just for kicks, they'd hide some of the sellotape inside the mechanism so that, just when you thought you'd got it all, you'd switch it on, and it'd make a horrible squealy shuddering noise that'll go on for an astonishingly long time.

Once you've overcome that part, though, ... more

A foray into the world of serious things is imminent, which should be enough to frighten you a little bit, really. I should probably give you fair warning that any of the stuff you want to find out, like networkability, print speed, memory capacity etc, you won't find out here. This is for three reasons: 1. I don't even understand the terms above, mainly because I made them up. They just sounded like they might relate to photocopier/printer-y type things. 2. I really don't care enough to find out. 3. You don't really want to know either. It's awfully dull all that stuff, and you can probably find it out on the HP website (assuming they have one. They probably do. I didn't care enough to find that out, either).

Anyway, what you really want to find out from a consumer review is whether your photocopier/printer-y type thing is secretly plotting in league with your modem to kill you to death as you sleep. Now, THAT'S the kind of question you'll find answered here.

I'll have a go at subheadings again, shall I? That proved to be a raging success the last time.

*Why did you buy the monstrously large and possibly sentient contraption in the first place?*

I didn't. My aunt bought it for me as a Christmas present. I know, that sucks, doesn't it? Come Christmas day I'll have nothing to open and people will say 'but, Fiona, console yourself with the thought of the printer that you got as a present 3 months ago, which is now a bit battered, nursing a thick layer of dust, and may possibly be actively trying to turn all your other electrical appliances against you.' I HATE when people do that. Don't get me wrong, I needed a printer and all, but I also wanted a nice big Christmas present, ideally in perfume, clothes or vodka format. And it's not as if I can rely on my mother to fill the void. One year I told her I wanted a DVD player. What she actually got me was a tacky indoor fountain that lights up, plays 'Greensleeves' and makes everybody that sees and hears it want to pee. That's just not even slightly like a DVD player.

This behemoth will cost you £99.99 if you schlep all the way to PC World (which, let's face it, you're going to want to do. No doubt you'll get it cheaper online, but then you'd miss out on all the joy of seeing a phenomenal number of be-acned teenagers with awful haircuts and retarded expressions forced to wear horrid purple shirts and talk absolute nonsense in the desperate hope that if they say the words 'LAN', 'RAM' and 'gigabyte' enough times somebody normal might fancy them enough to ask them out on a date and take them away from the world of soul-sapping misery that is PC World. If you happen to work in PC World, let me tell you, it's never going to happen. You're there for life. Mainly because you're too stupid to do any other job.)

The main reason I needed the thing was because I do quite a bit of photocopying and scanning. I have access to these things in work, but I'm rarely organised enough to know what it is I need to photocopy for the next day until about 9pm at night. Also, the photocopiers in work hate me and jam themselves with paper the minute I walk in the room. Foolishly, I thought that if I bought one, loved it, fed it paper and settled it in with all my other appliances it'd grow to love me and do my bidding whenever I pressed its buttons. This was not what happened at all.

I also attend night courses, for which I have to present 2 fairly lengthy essays a week (I know, imagine my surprise when they told me that just turning up, doodling for 6 hours, drinking coffee and idly flirting with the two boys who sit beside me wasn't going to be enough to earn me any qualifications. Stupid academic institutions and their stupid insistence on producing academic work). For this I needed a printer that'd be reliable and which would actually communicate with my PC in a meaningful way. PC World (bastards) had assured me my old printer would work with my new PC, but it turns out that PC World lie.

*You've now been brought to the very brink of your limits of patience and aggression by the teenagers in PC World and actually bought the thing. How easy is it to set up?*

Getting the damn thing out of the box is a challenge in itself, mainly because HP thought the absolute optimum way to package it would be to swathe it in the very stickiest sellotape known to man, and that, just for kicks, they'd hide some of the sellotape inside the mechanism so that, just when you thought you'd got it all, you'd switch it on, and it'd make a horrible squealy shuddering noise that'll go on for an astonishingly long time.

Once you've overcome that part, though, the trickiest things are fitting the paper trays which are cheap, fiddly, and absolutely not designed to go in their designated slots, and finding a location where the really quite short cables will reach everything without creating a mess of tangled wiring that will one day burst into flames and burn your house down. After 5 minutes you'll realise that you'll never find that location and will settle for balancing it awkwardly on a chair beside aforementioned mess of tangled wiring and accepting that, one day, this printer-y thing will be responsible for you being killed to death by burning. It's around now that you'll decide to get another 5 smoke alarms or so.

After that you pop the appropriate installation disc in and sit back and click 'ok' nine hundred and fifty four times when prompted and an hour later it'll be installed. Incidentally, it's best not to forget that you run Vista and put the XP disc in, because, by Christ, it doesn't like that at all and will spend an awfully long time producing prompts that tell you that you're stupid and will now have to spend the next two hours of your life trying to appease it in order to uninstall and then reinstall everything (that's the option I went for).

*You're in tears, shaking, and really, really want a drink now. How well does it do all the things it's supposed to do?*

In theory, this thing is a scanner, photocopier, printer, photo printer and fax machine. In reality, it's an evil and self-aware being that's quietly plotting to bring about the downfall of all mankind. You know this because it's got forty (forty!) buttons on it. My last printer had 3. Nothing in life needs that many buttons. After all, George Bush could kill us all with just the one big red one. If you can be arsed to read the manual it'll no doubt tell you how to use all the many, many buttons in a quietly efficient and productive manner. Much more fun, though, I feel, to have a go at pressing 6 or 7 randomly all at the same time to see how much you can upset it and the variety of high pitched noises you can make it do.

**As a fax machine**
You'll never use it as a fax machine because the leads are absurdly short, your phone jack will no doubt be on the other side of the room, and if you needed a fax that badly you'd probably already have one.

**As a scanner**
If you try and get it to scan something, it'll do it, but in a very begrudging manner which suggests that it always thought it was made for better things than this kind of inane request. You start off by opening the top, putting whatever it is face down on the glass and picking (more or less at random) one of the buttons to press. It'll then come up with a series of prompts which read (and I'm paraphrasing here): 'You want to scan THIS?' 'But this is a crap picture. Press 'ok' if you know that you're scanning rubbish things and that I was made for more important jobs than this.' 'Now that you've asked me to scan this nonsense, would you like it sent to a) a Word document, b) a file of my own choosing that's buried so deeply within your computer that you'll never find it (recommended option) or c) straight to the recycling bin, which is where it belongs, in my opinion. It'll then think for a minute or so about whether it can be arsed, and eventually send it to the Word document. If you have more than one Word document open it will, as a matter of course, send it to the one you don't want it to go to.

**As a photocopier**
You'll go through a lot of the same performance as above, only now you'll have the added entertainment of desperately trying to work out what way to place the piece of paper so that you don't end up with just half of what it is you want photocopied. After moving the document around at various angles and pleading quietly with Evil 6310 you'll find that the first way you tried was right and that the photocopier's just been toying with you all along. 30 minutes later you'll have a freshly photocopied document in either colour or black and white, depending on the whim of the photocopier. If you choose the 'fast' option, you'll get the document in 29 minutes and 30 seconds.
A word of warning: if you try and photocopy your boobs it'll object in the strongest terms possible.

**As a printer**
This is probably the most straightforward option, probably because all the work is done through your computer which loves you unequivocally and wants to please you in the manner of a bumbling Labrador puppy. Therefore, it's best not to put Evil 6310 right next to your PC, as they'll just never get along, and Evil 6310 will probably steal all of your PC's dinner money. Should you decide that you would quite like to print more than one page Evil 6310 will pause every 10 seconds or so to let the ink dry. If you make the mistake of quietly muttering 'oh for feck's sake, I'm in a hurry' it'll pause every 5 seconds.

If you want it to print photos it'll pause for an awfully long time (presumably to have a quiet chuckle to itself about how much of a twat you looked in that outfit) before doing a reasonably good job. To speed this process along it has various ports on the front for your memory card but I've never investigated those for the fear that if I do it'll break my fingers.

Should you take your life into your hands and buy one, you should know that Evil 6310 is a right snob, and if you try to feed it cheap Tesco value paper it'll merrily concertina vast tracts of paper around every internal mechanism and then resist strongly your efforts to pull it all out by brute force.

*Lastly, is Evil 6310 actively trying to kill you to death as you sleep?*

Yes.

I don't sleep much, and am wont to be pottering about the house at 3 or 4 in the morning. This is the time when all your other appliances are having a wee snooze and dreaming of the day when they get a plug socket of their very own, rather than the dangerously overloaded 5 plug adaptor you've currently got them on. Evil 6310, by contrast, will be wide awake, bathed in an eerie green glow and making a serious of chugging and clicking noises that suggests it somehow has a small internal munitions factory working round the clock and is mobilising the troops. Sleep with one eye open. 

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