Design
The only phrase that comes to mind when describing the L7590 is "hulking behemoth". This thing is big — weighing in at just over 15 kilograms and with dimensions of 35.6x52.5x46.6cm it's certainly not going to go unnoticed in an office.
At the front sits the control panel, with dedicated sections for scanning, faxing, a dial/number pad and additional print buttons on the side. There's also a small screen which, when idle, displays the ink levels of the tanks.
To the right are the memory slots with room for all the major card types, plus a USB port. Connections to power, Ethernet and USB are at the back of the printer. The power cord is quite short though, meaning the beast will have to be fairly close to the power source.
Features
As is usual with any office printer, the L7590 has features in spades. There's the standard multifunction capability — scan, copy, fax and print — plus a 50-page document feeder and an automatic duplexer that clips on at the back of the unit.
Naturally there's also Ethernet connectivity, but no Wi-Fi. As indicated by the product name, the L7590 is an inkjet multifunction, not a laser, using four ink tanks (cyan, magenta, yellow and black).
In the box you are provided with the printer itself, a range of installation CDs, a USB and power cable, fax cord, the duplex unit, instruction manuals and an Ethernet cable.
Performance
The installation process for the L7590 was troublesome, to say the least. In the middle of a lengthy (20-minute) installation process, the software caused our computer to crash. Fortunately, after a restart, the L7590 was ready to use.
When the printer arrived for us to test, it already had ink tanks installed in the unit. Therefore, we had assumed that all the print heads would have been aligned, and there would be no problems printing. Imagine our surprise when we came to print a test page, large chunks of the text were blurred, obscured and often weren't even printed at all.
In an attempt to resolve the problem, we printed several more diagnostic sheets which still displayed the same problem where colours bled into each other, black lines appeared over blocks of plain colour, and lines of text were simply not printed at all.
It took about an hour of continually cleaning and re-cleaning the print heads through the printer interface to fix the problem. We found this unacceptable for a printer straight out of the box to cause this much hassle, and subsequently have deducted a substantial portion of the score for this.
However, once we had fixed the problem, we set about testing the print speed. HP claimed that in draft speed, the L7590 was capable of reaching 35 pages a minute in draft (black) and 12 pages a minute in laser quality (black).
For a five-page document, it took 13 seconds for the first page to emerge, and then 32 seconds in total for the document to finish. On average, once the first page had emerged it took four seconds for each subsequent page to print. Working this out as pages per minute, we got the L7590 to spit out around 11 or 12 pages a minute on normal quality.
Scanning and copying also put the L7590 back in our good books — averaging around 20 seconds for a scan and print. There was a degree of graininess to the final print, so the average office won't be throwing out their dedicated photocopier just yet.
The automatic duplexer was certainly a useful addition on the printer, though it wasn't exactly quick; 37 seconds for a duplex print to be fully complete, including the time it took for the printer to wait for the ink to dry before taking the sheet back for the second pass.
It was also pretty noisy during printing, with all the clunking that's usually associated with inkjet printers.
As for the quality of plain text documents, well, we weren't impressed. At times, depending on the font and the size of the text, it was crisp and clear. Sans-serif fonts, however, appeared blurred and smudged in small places across the page. The quality varied wildly between our test prints.
Furthermore, photo prints weren't anything special either, which is a shame seeing as one of the smaller HP multifunctions we recently tested — the Photosmart C6380 — delivered some very nice photo prints.
Warranty, support and cost of ownership
HP claims that the L7590 can print 2,450 pages (black), or 1,700 pages (colour) using high capacity cartridges. At the time of writing, at an average price of AU$49.95 for a black cartridge and AU$36 each for the three separate colours, the cost per page works out to be 2 cents and 6 cents respectively.
HP offers online chat support and documentation on its website, plus the L7590 comes with a one year limited warranty (return to HP or vendor).
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