Digital photography is gaining in popularity, and the features offered by the HP PhotoSmart 2710 are designed to cater to this: PictBridge, a large colour screen and on-printer photo editing. The HP is the most expensive machine here, but isn't geared to one particular market or another. It has wireless networking, which is a plus in a small office environment, but doesn't offer a copier tray, making faxing and copying all the more tiresome as you manually replace one document with the next.
In performance terms, the HP comes in at the middle of the pack. Photo and print quality were uniformly excellent, and the printing times were also competitive with the rest. The one disappointment with this $700 machine is its scanner, producing relatively low quality scans. In our colour scan, colours were washed out and non-uniform, and edges were blocky. The OCR results were also very poor, the planet graphic proved too much for the scan engine and it produced only gibberish in its place. It seems as though we have here an excellent printer bolted Frankenstein-style onto an average imaging device.
It's a very sturdy unit, but some of the buttons cheapen the feel of the unit -- the rubber fax and scan buttons resemble those you might find on a cheap remote control. Another sticking point is the inclusion of only two ink tanks -- for such an expensive machine this is quite an oversight: once you run out of one colour you'll need to replace the whole thing.
The HP is a machine is a good product, with some good features, but its price is too expensive for the home or SOHO market when you look at the competition.