Labs

Several of the printers in this group ended up with the respectable but uninspiring score of 3 out of 5. Each missed out on a higher rating for a different reason. The HP's flaw was its price. The CP3505 is not a bad printer, but next to its rivals - which in several cases offer additional features such as networking - it's just too expensive.

The HP occupies more desk space than any other printer here, and its two-tone grey and charcoal colour scheme puts it in the 'office workhorse' camp. With the

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noise it produced, however, a real camp would be a better location, preferably in the middle of some woods well away from our office. It was slow to start up from cold, perhaps reflecting the fact that this type of machine is made to sit in a corner permanently switched on (like the others, it does use a power-saving standby mode).

Our opinion rose dramatically when we started printing. On paper, the HP is one of the slowest printers here, but that's because we ran all our tests at each model's highest resolution. In the case of the HP, that's a generous 1200x1200dpi. Dropping the quality settings and turning off HP's PhoroREt image enhancement reduced the times for our hi-res photo test to around two-thirds of the original one minute and 12 seconds. At the highest resolution, the HP's photo output was the most impressive on test, with natural-looking skin tones, smooth gradations, and good detail in shadows.

At 1.1p and 5.6p respectively, per-page costs for mono and colour pages are fairly low. Sadly, it would still take an awfully long time to recoup that hefty purchase price.