PRINTING. The HP Officejet 5740 prints using inkjet technology, which sprays liquid ink onto the paper from a moving head. Its text printing is excellent, as sharp and bold as a typical laser printer. Text printing was reasonably fast, 9.1 pages per minute, costing 7.7 cents per page. Its color graphics printing is very good for reports, newsletters and web pages. It has an auto duplex feature that lets you print both on sides of the page, with no loss of quality. The multi-color ink cartridge must be replaced when a single color runs out. It also has a separate tray for snapshot-size photo paper.
SCANNING and COPYING. Scanning performance was very good, fine for general-purpose scanning. It can scan or copy an area up to 11.7 x 8.5 inches. Copying performance was very good, suitable for most purposes. There's an automatic document feeder to let you copy or scan a stack of pages in one operation. Includes OCR (optical character recognition) software, useful for making scanned documents editable in a word processor program.
CONTROLS and DISPLAY. The printer has a medium-size 2.6-inch display screen with a touchscreen.
CONNECTIVITY and NETWORKING. The HP Officejet 5740 has a memory-card reader for directly printing documents and images stored on an SD card. It lacks USB PictBridge for direct printing from cameras. You can connect directly to a PC with a USB cable, or to your network router either wirelessly with WiFi or with an Ethernet cable. This model has built-in faxing, can store incoming faxes if the paper runs out, and can send faxes from an attached PC. You can also print items emailed from the Internet. The printer can access the Internet directly using downloadable 'apps', letting you print information from news and entertainment services.
