While I’ve complained loudly about cheap HP ink-jet printers, and all-in-one printer/scanner/fax machines, this number seems to be working well out of the box.

This unit is an inkjet printer/scanner. List price is around US$179.00. You’ll need to add a USB cable for another $24.00 or so, and when you start to buy cartridges for it, they’ll run over $50.00 for a combination of black and a photo color cartridge.

Output is impressive, and if you have memory cards from a digital camera, you can put that in and print directly. It makes nice borderless glossy photo prints on the sample HP photo paper which comes with the unit.

With an HP print server, the unit can be placed on the network and you can scan and send the scanned files directly to up to five workstations, or print to it across the network.

The software installation takes about 30 minutes, and they devote several pages in the manual to troubleshooting problems that come up if you attach the printer via the USB cable before installing the software.

We’ll put this one in the “preliminary recommendation” category.