Measuring a compact 7 by 16.75 by 8 inches and weighing a scant 8.3 pounds, the 4315 takes up no more space than a small ink jet on your desktop, with the scanner input and output trays neatly folded over the unit in their closed position. When you need to scan, fax, or copy, you can unfold the trays, then fold them back when you’re done. Although the trays add both height and depth to the unit, they don’t affect the footprint, since both trays use airspace well away from the desktop.

In addition to printing, the 4315 scans, faxes from a PC, works as a standalone fax machine and copier, and can even scan straight to e-mail. It’s also equipped with a 20-page automatic document feeder, making copying, faxing, or scanning multipage documents a breeze.

To say speed is not this AIO’s strong point is an understatement. On my business applications suite, I timed the 4315 at 32 minutes 18 seconds. The HP PSC 1510, which is the same price (but doesn’t have an ADF or built-in fax support), blows that away, at 18:00. Photo speed is also sluggish, averaging 4:45 for each 4-by-6 and 12:06 for each 8-by-10.

Moreover, output quality is below par for an ink jet printer, but the problems lie primarily with highly stylized fonts using thick strokes. For the fonts that are most likely to show up on business documents, the output is more than acceptable. More than half of the fonts on our tests were easily readable, with well-formed characters, at 5 points or smaller. Two highly stylized fonts with thick strokes couldn’t qualify as easily readable even at 12 points, but if you’re looking for an AIO for business use, you probably won’t be using that kind of font.

Graphics were easily good enough for any internal business use. But I saw some minor banding in default mode, dithering in the form of subtle graininess, and posterization (with shading changing suddenly where it should change gradually), that would give me second thoughts about handing over the output to anyone I was trying to impress. On the other hand, if you use the best quality settings, you can coax output from the 4315 that’s good enough to use when you need to put your best foot forward.

Photos are close to true photo quality, but not waterproof, which means that they are best kept in a frame behind glass. Pass them around for people to look at, and they may come back smudged from slightly moist fingers. HP says prints should be water-resistant using its new Advanced Photo Paper, but the output quality with that paper is a touch lower than with the recommended Premium Plus Photo Paper.