Product Reviews

While the Canon Pixma iP3000 crams as many features as possible into a small, cheap printer, this latest addition to HP's Deskjet range concentrates on providing core printer functions with the option to extend its capabilities later.

The Deskjet 6540's build quality is much better than the Canon model. The smart metal shell of the HP is much more dapper than the silver plastic of the Canon, and the whole unit suffers less from rattle. The lid is even geared so that it closes softly rather than shutting with a bang.

There's an elegant, responsive control panel on the front of the printer that shows printer status through a system of lights, and that allows you to switch between draft, normal and best print qualities. The print driver can respect this setting or can override it, but the latter was the case by default, which is rather irritating. The Paper type also can be automatically sensed, but, again by default, this wasn't the case.

Paper is fed in the traditional HP way, with sheets being pulled through a U-shaped path. This can be a problem if it's printing onto thick or exotic media, but generally works well. A slot is also included for the quick, one-off printing of envelopes.

As with the Pixma iP3000, a USB port is included on the front of the printer, but in this case it's not designed for direct printing from digital cameras. Instead, it's being touted as a second port to make it easy for laptop users to connect to the printer. We're not convinced that

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it's much use, as it's just as convenient to keep a connection plugged in at the rear and trail the cable to the front.

Inkjet printers from HP are traditionally very competent when printing text, and this model's no exception. Letters are crisp and black on default settings, and text output is as good as that from the current crop of personal laser printers; even lowering the quality to draft only added slight feathering to the characters. Print speeds are no match for a laser - a 25-page document took just over four minutes to print on draft, a minute more for default - but are acceptable. Using Fast Draft mode boosts the speeds to more than 21 pages per minute, but the results are barely acceptable.

We were more concerned with photo output. Prints are delivered in a reasonable time - just under two minutes for a best-quality borderless 6 x 4in photo - but the detail in photographs is a little fudged and colours tend towards the bland. Prints also suffer from an unfortunate embossed effect caused by ink sitting on top of the paper.

Things improve a little when you swap the black cartridge for the photo cartridge, turning the printer from a four-colour, CMYK device to one boasting additional light cyan and light magenta. Detail was still a little soft and colours lacked punch, even on photo paper, but the photos were certainly smoother. A special grey cartridge can also be installed for dedicated mono photos.

This modular approach makes sense, as it means you can choose whether to run this printer as a business or creative device. An extra £50 will add an automatic duplex unit, which also boasts a small paper tray similar to that found on the Canon Bubble Jet i990. An additional 250-sheet tray is available for around £50.

This printer makes sense for home and small business use, where the focus is on text printing. Mono pages cost less than 3p per sheet. You can add to this to create the best printer for you, but the poor photo output and stiff pricing competition from models such as the Canon Pixma iP3000 means it drops to four mice.