With all the chaos that’s been taking place at Hewlett-Packard recently, we weren’t expecting to see anything neat out of the HP labs any time soon—but with its computer, tablet, and phone businesses up for sale, that leaves printers. So it’s nice to see that the upcoming TopShot Laserjet Pro M275 ($400, aka Laserjet Pro 200 Color MFP M275nw) has a cool new trick up its sleeve: 3-D object scanning. The feature’s impressive in and of itself, but the price makes this multifunction printer and scanner sound like a steal.
To scan, you just put an object on the top of the device, raise the scanning arm and you’re good to go. The 3-D scanning may be the key feature of this TopShot unit, but it’s certainly not the only one. Copying is supported at 600 by 600dpi, versus camera scanning at 245dpi, with color printing at 4ppm and black and white at 17ppm. Like many of HP’s current printers, this one features ePrint—the ability to print documents from anywhere by emailing them to the printer—and AirPrint for your iOS devices. And there’s a whole suite of web-connected apps that allow you to use it without even having a Mac hooked up. What do you lose? Fax capabilities, so you won’t be able to send your glorious 3-D object scans over a dial-up modem to low-resolution black and white printers. We’re guessing you’ll get over that limitation pretty quickly.
