Labs

The first of two A4 HP printers in this group is a solid all-rounder with the bonus of a network port, so you can plug it into your router and access it from any PC on your network. We found it remarkably easy to set up; its installer correctly detected it across our network, and the 3.5 inch touchscreen displayed a step-by-step setup guide.

Unfortunately, like most HP models, the D7260 defaults to the American Letter paper size. To switch it to A4 you have to use the Device Settings and Printing Preferences options in Windows' Printers and Faxes list.

Print quality

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wasn't the best we've seen from an inkjet, but looked fairly good in all our tests. Ten pages printed in just over a minute. Full quality print speeds were slower, with ten mixed colour pages emerging in four minutes, and ten pages of the mono text in one minute and 47 seconds. A mixed colour A4 page costs 7.5p to print, and a 6x4 inch photo 25p.

Colour documents were particularly impressive, with bright solid tones on illustrations and graphs. Mono text was sharp and easy to read.We were particularly impressed by the fast, high quality draft mode, which was good enough to use for everyday printing.

Dark areas on our photos were very blotchy and inconsistently coloured when they first came out of the printer, but this improved as they dried. However, dark shades weren't as deep as we hoped for, and our low contrast test image looked murky, particularly when printed direct from a memory card rather than via the PC driver.

The D7260 offers good, though not outstanding photo output, and is very easy to use. The Ethernet port is useful if you have a network, and direct printing is fully catered for by memory card slots and PictBridge USB.