HP LaserJet Enterprise color flow MFP M575c

Pros Encrypted hard drive. Pull-out keyboard. 8-inch color touch screen. 100-sheet ADF. Two-sided, single-pass scanning.

Cons Low standard paper capacity. Relatively high running costs. Bottom Line The HP LaserJet Enterprise color flow MFP M575c has some intriguing workflow features like a single-pass two-sided scanner and a full-sized pull-out keyboard.

By Tony Hoffman

As an HP "flow" multifunction printer (MFP), the HP LaserJet Enterprise color flow MFP M575c adds a sheaf of workflow-friendly features over the standard versions in its line: a pull-out keyboard and a 100-sheet single-pass duplexing scanner chief among them. It's worth considering by deep-pocketed businesses seeking a formidable workhorse color MFP to help boost productivity.

The M575c is the high-end model in the series that includes the HP LaserJet Enterprise 500 Color MFP M575dn and the HP LaserJet Enterprise 500 Color MFP M575f ($2,699). The M575f adds fax capabilities and a stapler to the M575dn, while the M575c adds the workflow features I discuss in this review.

The flow M575c can print, scan, copy, and fax; it can scan to e-mail, a network folder, USB thumb drive, or an FTP server, and print from a USB key. It has an 8-inch color touch screen interface, offers secure, password-protected printing, and has a built-in 320GB encrypted hard drive.

It measures 23 by 21.6 by 21.8 inches (HWD), much too large to share a desk with, and weighs 105 pounds. Its 100-sheet document feeder (ADF) scans both sides of a document simultaneously, saving time over scanners like the one in the M525dn (with a smaller, 50-sheet ADF), which flips the document over to scan the other side. The M575c's scanner also incorporates some features lacking in the M575dn and M575f, including ultrasonic misfeed detection, auto orientation, auto page crop, and other image correction features, send to SharePoint, and embedded OCR.

The M575c has a standard paper capacity of 350 sheets, split between a 250-sheet main tray and a 100-sheet multipurpose tray. You can add an optional 500-sheet tray as well. An automatic duplexer lets you print on both sides of a sheet of paper. On the side of the printer is a built-in "convenience" stapler for manually stapling documents of up to about 25 pages.

The M575c can connect via USB or Ethernet (including Gigabit Ethernet), and an optional Wi-Fi adapter is available ($269 direct). It's compatible with HP ePrint and Apple's AirPrint. I tested the printer on a wired network with its drivers installed on a PC running Windows Vista.

Printing Speed
I timed the flow M575c on our business applications test suite, using QualityLogic's hardware and software for testing, at an effective 8.0 pages per minute (ppm), a good speed for its rated speed of 31 pages per minute. (Rated speeds are based on text-only printing, while our business suite combines text pages, graphics pages, and pages with both text and graphics.) It would have been faster yet, but its average time was slowed by a long "calibration" period while printing a PowerPoint file in one of our test runs. The Editors' Choice Dell C3765dnf Multifunction Laser Printer tested at 8.3 ppm in our official test in its default duplex mode and 10.1 ppm when I switched to simplex. I timed the HP M575dn at 8.5 ppm, and the Editors' Choice Lexmark X548dte at 7.0 ppm.

Output Quality
Output quality for the M575c was pretty typical across the board, with average text quality, average graphics quality, and average photos. Text quality is good enough for any typical business use, except perhaps desktop publishing applications using very small fonts.

With graphics, some fine lines were lost, and black backgrounds looked faded. Graphics quality was good enough for PowerPoint handouts, though I might hesitate to give them to a potential client I was seeking to impress.

Several photos showed slight tints, and there was a loss of detail in some bright and dark areas in several prints. Photo quality is good enough to print out recognizable images from Web pages, and perhaps for company newsletters, depending on how picky you are.

Running Costs
At 1.8 cents per monochrome page and 13 cents per color page, the M525c's running costs are a bit on the high side. The Editors' Choice Dell C3765dnf has a lower per-page cost (1.5 cents for monochrome and 10 cents for color), as does the Lexmark X548dte (1.6 and 11 cents).

The HP LaserJet Enterprise color flow MFP M575c is a massive and impressively full-featured color MFP. Its added workflow features include a 100-sheet automatic document feeder (ADF) that scans both sides of a document at a single pass, saving time over the likes of the Dell C3765dnf, which has an ADF that flips a two-sided document over to scan the back. Other goodies include the pull-out keyboard, automatic image correction features, and embedded OCR. It has good but not exceptional speed, and its output quality is solid across the board.

It's a product that brings to mind the adage "you get what you pay for." It provides a slew of workflow-friendly features at a steep premium (nearly 3 times the price of the Editors' Choice Dell C3765dnf, which has a comparable maximum duty cycle). Generally, the higher sticker price of a printer, the lower its running costs will be, but the flow MFP M575c's color costs are higher than many much less expensive models, including the Dell C3765dnf and Lexmark X548dte.

Its standard 350-sheet paper capacity is also much lower than the Dell C3765's 700 sheets and the Lexmark X548dte's 900 sheets. Yet although there are faster MFPs, and ones with better output quality, the HP LaserJet Enterprise color flow MFP M575c provides some exceptional features such as the single-pass two-sided scanner with 100-sheet ADF, and is definitely worth considering by businesses willing to pay a premium for them.

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QuickBooks Enterprise Solutions

Pros Easy-to-understand upgrade for existing QuickBooks users. Generous data capacity. Can work in two company files simultaneously. Pre-defined user roles. Enhanced customizability.

Cons Remote access limited; uses WebEx. No revenue recognition management. Reporting, inventory lacking. Limited global capabilities. Bottom Line QuickBooks Enterprise Solutions represents the top of the QuickBooks desktop software product line. It adds data capacity, more sophisticated inventory management, support for multiple entities, and consolidation to the same feature set, navigational scheme and user interface that's offered in Intuit's other products.

By Kathy Yakal

Anyone who has investigated small business accounting software at all knows the name "QuickBooks." Long the market leader, QuickBooks has won numerous Editors' Choice awards from us, thanks to its usability and a smart set of accounting tools. The software family has been around since the early 90s, when QuickBooks for DOS was launched.

Over the years, the line has grown. QuickBooks Enterprise Solutions is the newest (though it's at least a decade old) member, and the most sophisticated. It looks and works exactly like the more junior versions of QuickBooks, which means it uses simplified language and a clean, attractive user interface and straightforward navigational tools to make accounting more understandable for non-accountants.

QuickBooks Enterprise Solutions, being the very top of the Intuit food chain, adds complexity and capacity in many areas. It's superior to the rest of the line in areas like pricing flexibility, inventory management and reporting. It can track tens of thousands of people, items, accounts, etc., and up to 30 employees can access it simultaneously.

That would imply that QuickBooks Enterprise Solutions can be used by companies large enough to have 30 people working on the financial books at the same time. It's unlikely that the application would be used by such a sizable business, given that it's not scalable; it's rooted to the desktop (unless it's hosted) without the benefit of a lot of comparable add-ons (it can integrate with options in the Intuit App Center, but they're not built to take advantage of midrange solutions, except for Salesforce) and it lacks some of the automation and depth offered by the midrange solutions I reviewed.

Bases Covered
Like Sage 50 Quantum, QuickBooks Enterprise Solutions touches the low end of midrange accounting applications (though it doesn't have inventory management muscle to rival Sage 50 Quantum unless you pay for the Advanced Inventory module). It's gone about as far as it can go in terms of meeting small business bookkeeping needs without overwhelming its target market with too much.

Intuit has, therefore, for the past few years focused on giving users better access to their existing data and streamlining the interface. Its core is a solid double-entry, GAAP-compliant accounting solution, but as it faces the user, it replicates the tasks they were previously doing manually. It maintains a general ledger and provides record and transaction forms for managing accounts payable and receivable, inventory and payroll, and reports.

Because it's a desktop software product, though, it makes those financial chores faster and easier, and the results more accurate. Once you create a customer record using the templates provided, for example, you can insert that data anywhere it's needed—on an invoice, in a collection letter, in a report, etc., without ever having to type it in again. All of the program's individual elements are integrated, and they're designed to accelerate the daily workflow and ensure that accounting rules are followed, warning the user when something isn't being done correctly.

Above and Beyond
QuickBooks Pro and Premier do all of those things. But Enterprise Solutions adds functionality and flexibility to every part of the product. Forms have more custom fields. You can work in two company files simultaneously and create consolidated financial statements. You can do more tasks on a global and/or multi-user level, like change price levels or set defaults, and adjust inventory or change sales tax rates. Pricing levels are far more flexible: You can establish hundreds of them.

Inventory management –always the weakest area in Pro and Premier – is much stronger. You can manage multiple warehouses and always know where your stock is down to the bin level.  Bar code scanning and serial or lot tracking are also available. It supports two costing methods: average cost and FIFO (Sage 50 Quantum and true midrange solutions offer more). QuickBooks Enterprise Solutions also supports connections to ODBC-compliant applications for custom report creation.

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