The HP 4355 occupies very little space and can do almost everything required. This multifunction device comes with printer, fax machine, scanner and copier.

With a rectangular design, the printer measures 42.5 x 50.5 x 33 mm and isn’t that big. Once the face plate is firmly secured, the dialpad and other buttons are scattered around the black and white LCD screen and are easily accessible. The screen offers two lines of data, which is enough for most uses.

The printer incorporates a fax machine and comes with a handset. For convenience, it is equipped with separate buttons for speed dial, redial and fax resolution. Once the cartridges (it requires two: black and tricolor) are attached, you need only worry about aligning them and you are ready to go.

This inkjet delivered a mixed performance in our tests. To begin with, I didn’t like the way the printer handled gradients. With less than smooth gradients, the color prints showed banding in many places across the page.

One point to be noted here is that while printing blacks, you will notice a bluish tinge, which is seen in almost all HP printers. While this doesn’t look ugly, it isn’t the best black reproduction either. However, the lines have no aliasing, so that’s a plus point.

HP ink tends to produce slightly saturated prints with vibrant colors, presumably to make them look catchy. Thankfully the prints weren’t grainy, unless you try looking through the magnifying glass. Yet it’s low on detailing. Some of our tests showed really messed-up details.

In our rather extensive font test, the prints produced quite clean results with no ink spillage. That apart, the HP 4355 is a sub-par scanner, with dull results. One thing I didn’t approve of is that the printer takes way too long to print. For a full-scale A4-sized high quality print, it took about 12 minutes, which is really long. It took about 8 minutes to print 20 pages of text.

The color cartridge ran out of ink after about 145 prints. The color cartridge costs Rs 775 and the black cartridge is priced at Rs 675, while the combo can be bought at Rs 1,200.

Rs 6,800 is rather a steep price for an MFD with performance like that of the HP Officejet 4355. If you consider vibrant colors and lack of grain in the prints as plus points, sure enough the 4355 is an okay choice. If you don't mind waiting a while for the results, that is.

Laiq Qureshi