Labs

HP's stylish C5280 has a 2.4 inch colour display that gives you access not only to direct printing from memory cards, but also to a full range of maintenance and cleaning options. It has a neatly designed tray for photo paper up to 7x5 inch size, which is automatically drawn into the device when you select an appropriate paper type.

A4 printing wasn't so reliable, though. We found it difficult to align pages correctly between the guides in the main paper tray, and our prints were frequently skewed. This wasn't the only problem we had with A4 documents, which, even after print head

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alignment and nozzle cleaning, suffered from a slight but visible shadow at both normal and draft quality. Photocopies also showed a range of problems, with pale tones in colour copies taking on a lurid yellow hue, while blocks of pale shading in our mono copies came out with dark, jagged outlines.

It's not all bad news, though. 6x4 inch photo quality was outstanding, with rich colours and smooth shading, even though the printer uses composite black made by combining cyan, magenta, and yellow, which looks slightly washed out. Despite such issues, draft prints still looked pretty good, and it took just 30 seconds to print our ten-page text document.

We were pleased with the colour accuracy of scans, despite slow performance, particularly at the unusually high maximum resolution of 4800x4800dpi. Unfortunately, scanned images looked grainy even at 1200dpi, and straight lines were poorly reproduced in lower resolution scans.

HP's inkjet printers and all-in-ones are usually excellent, but the frustrating C5280 appears to be a rare exception. Although it's well built and has some good features, its numerous minor flaws make it less than enjoyable to use.