Originally appeared in the Saint Paul Pioneer Press

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If you have been in a superstore in recent months, you may have noticed a new category over in the printer section. It's the multifunction printer section, and it sells printers, mostly of the inkjet type, that do other things as well -- scan images, send and receive faxes, make copies, resize images, and make coffee.

Well, maybe they don't all make coffee, but that's a lot of things for one machine to do. The question I have, submitted by one Rose McCracken of Albany, is "Should I get one of these?"

And the answer is a definite maybe. I recently acquired one of these multifunction printers, the Hewlett Packard OfficeJet 570. It is an inexpensive ($350 street price) way to fit lots of stuff onto a single tabletop, and use only one electrical plug. There are many things to like about it.

First, you get printing, using two HP inkjets, one for black and white, and one for color work. The resolution is sharp - 600 dots per inch for black and white and 600x300 for color. The two jets work very well together, creating graphics that are not quite photo-quality, but close enough that you won't often be apologizing for print quality.

Second, you get reliable faxing. You can either send documents from the fax machine, or send documents in your computer through the machine. (Your regular modem is not involved -- the document travels to the fax machine through a bidirectional printer cable.) The machine has a 45-page memory, so you can receive faxes even while the machine is doing something else.

Third, you can copy in either color or black and white. You can make "copies" (they have a grainy, not-quite-right, but pretty-good-anyway quality) of color graphics, photos, or anything else that is 8"x14" or less and you want a copy of. I used it to make copies of my son Jon's school pictures -- and then sent the pictures back.

Finally, you get black-and-white, 600 dot-per-inch page scanning, and optical character recognition capabilities via Caere's OmniPage software. This was the last reason I wanted the printer for, as I usually have poor results with OCR software - scans that more closely resemble cuneiform tablets than my original documents. Ten years after my first awful experience with OCR, I got exceptional results on this bottom-of-the-line machine. I was able to copy old manuscripts I'd typed 20 years earlier, and have them transformed in 99% perfect MS Word documents.

All this sounds highly favorable, especially for an inexpensive machine. But there are downsides as well.

The first is that, while it does many things, it does them all pretty slowly. Black and white print jobs are slow enough, at 2-3 pages per minute. If there is color in the jobs, that rate can slow even more. This slowness makes it an unlikely prospect for any but the pokiest office.

Second, this is one noisy machine. I found it very difficult to think about anything during printing except the printing. It's fun to watch the color squirt onto the page. But there are better uses for your time.

Third, the scanner is black-and-white, not color. You may want to spend an extra $30 to get full color scanning with another model.

Fourth, if you are accustomed to laser printing, inkjet, even at 600 dpi, will seem like a step down. Most models cannot print as close to the page margins as lasers - making economical page design more difficult. And these ink refills cost money -- $35 per refill. It would be nice if the print menus offered a black-only option for documents that are in color onscreen, but don't need to be in color on the printed page.

Fifth, and perhaps most critically, is the inherent shortcomings of a multifunction printer, and it is the reason I tell Ms. McCracken to think carefully. Things fall apart, as Yeats said; especially inkjet printers. The printheads gum up. Dust clogs the system. Occasionally, the little tractor guy who pulls the paper in stubs his toe, and stops working. When this happens, you have to get the printer repaired before you can use the other doodads.

Ordinarily, I advise against buying extended warranties on computer items, but I'll make an exception for multifunction printers. Unless your use of these functions is so casual that you don't mind missing a week of uptime, buy the best service contract you can afford.

On this particular model, HP offers a one-year express warranty, promising return of the machine in 3-5 working days. The best solution might be to buy two. They're cheap enough, and the betting here is that you will need them.

On the plus side, while it's being repaired, you won't have to listen to it.

America's Best-Loved Technology Writer(TM), Michael Finley has a free gift for visitors to http://mfinley.com.