The days of the cobbled together multifunction printer are thankfully long gone. While the old adage 'Jack of all trades, master of none' hasn't been totally shrugged off, the latest specimens of this hybrid breed are really quite good. What makes the OfficeJet V40 special is its price: at under £200, it's one of the cheapest on the market.

The list of functions is par for the course: it's a 600dpi colour inkjet printer, a 600dpi 36bit TWAIN-compliant colour scanner and a colour fax machine all rolled into one.

A fourth copier function results from linking scanning and printing. Although it needs a PC to get the most out of it, the V40 will work perfectly well as a standalone fax/copier machine.

Setting up the OfficeJet V40 is a doddle: you install the software first and then plug the V40 into the PC. This is a USB, PC-only device. Infuriatingly, Hewlett Packard doesn't include a USB cable in the box so you have to fork out for a cable. At this rate it wouldn't surprise us if ink cartridges become optional extras.

The V40 comes with reasonable paper documentation but the attention paid to the key grouping of the keypad on the V40 makes this documentation almost redundant. A two-line, 16-character LCD status panel tells you what's going on. The paper input tray holds up to 150 sheets, while the scanner/fax has a 20-page document feeder on the top.

A useful feature is a 'Photo Fit to Page' button, which lets you automatically blow up a snapshot to, say, A4 size. The print engine delivers good-quality images, especially when used with glossy photo paper.

On the downside, we couldn't select landscape mode for printing, and the driver would often claim to lose its printer connection. The speed of the V40 proved mildly disappointing, too. On text, up to 8ppm is promised: in reality, text output is precisely 4ppm with the first page being delivered after 24 seconds. Copying a page of text took 41 seconds to duplicate, an A4 colour copy took 74 seconds.

CONTACT: Hewlett Packard
08705 474 747
www.hp.com/uk