This will win no friends style wise as it is just a rectangle 42x29x14cm however when in use there needs to free space in front for paper to be ejected and roughly another 15cm to the 14cm height for the paper stack. This is however a very functional rectangle.

It can be a four or six ink printer. Four ink black and tri colour as it comes but you can purchase a photo cartridge to replace the black making the six ink option.

Once you have installed the cartridges and put some paper in you can copy without even going near the PC, a black copy takes around 18seconds and while that is not astonishingly fast the output was quite acceptable. I own a stand alone copier and that can produce 4PPM but these days I rarely use it as a multi function unit is easier and it has reduction and enlargement capabilities that my basic copier does not. For a stand alone full page colour copy it was close to 45seconds.

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Unusually this unit is plugged in before installing the software. A large getting started sheet covers all the relevant details. Also you get a 124 page printed Owners Manual.

I am not a fan of time limited software you get a 60 day version of Corel Paint Shop Pro Studio and Paint Shop Photo Album 5 that you can turn into a full copy by online purchase. However this unit also comes with a full copy of Harry Potter Print Studio. Should you already have a favourite piece of software that can be used instead.

The OCR side is handled by a full copy of Abbyy Fine Reader 6 Sprint and for anyone who has not looked at OCR software recently try this, as without any training this is excellent, a normal letter with say a graphic in the header scans perfectly and all layouts are kept it looks like a copy but it has been OCR'd.

Printing in normal mode produced the nonsensical 200 word document 10PPM the quality was good. In draft mode it churned it out at 15PPM but output was slightly grey. Printing a real 1500 word document spread over four pages produced similar output at a very respectable 12PPM.

As far as scanning goes this is a flatbed unit and the operation of the unit was flawless and I was perfectly happy with every scanning be it image or OCR using the supplied Abbyy Fine Reader 6 Sprint.

Printing graphics even in four ink mode was fine and the output quite acceptable. As regular readers will know I am not that interested in speed only quality but as it matters for some I always give times. Printing four 9x13cm images using Windows Photo Printing wizard produced excellent images in a very respectable 177seconds. Printing a full A4 image borderless came out in 210seconds and in the very top quality 6 ink 4800DPI 380seconds, the quality was stunning. The image was a tiny bit tacky to the touch on the back edge.

As a copier good, as a scanner good, as a printer good, should you need to send an occasional fax okay but remember it cannot receive. I do not like time limited software but the inclusion of the Harry Potter version of Print Studio negates that. I understand that ink is not included as standard and while you may not want a USB cable you certainly need ink, so why is it not a standard item? So my price of £132 includes the ink but not the USB cable, this is only sold by mail so P&P is included.