HP AMP 120

A NEW TYPE OF ALL-IN-ONE.

BY FAR THE most unique printer in this round up — and probably on the shelves — as HP’s AMP 120 includes a built-in Bluetooth speaker that plays music and accepts calls from your smartphone. It’ll even recharge your handset thanks to the included USB port. The big trade off for this device is that it doesn’t come with a scanner, but the Bluetooth speaker is surprisingly powerful and clear.

Setup is painless, the app superb for getting a cloud service up and running, though you’ll need a separate plugin to get images from your photo roll or gallery printed. This process is well explained in the app. All of your print jobs will have to be sent from your laptop or mobile, as there is no SD card input.

Black-and-white text has a very minor amount of blurring, and produced pages at just over 2ppm during our print test. The tri-colour tank puts up a fair fight for photos, but images suffer from a barcode effect where you can see the lines across the image. They’re also a bit flat — fine for the occasional happy snap but not something you’d want to hang on your walls. There’s just the one paper inlet, and a slightly fiddly guide to move around if you want to change paper types. You’ll also have to manually extend the paper outlet, and the printer does give pages a good shove once it’s done with them, so that guide is there to avoid pages ending up on the floor. Automatic double sided printing is not an option.

The speaker and the USB charging point are the big drawcards here, and if space on your desktop and at the powerpoint are limited, it’s worth considering.