HP Photosmart C5280

If you've looked at the feature table, you may be wondering why the HP Photosmart C5280 costs £116. The only other all-in-one above £100, the Kodak 5300, makes the reasons for its price very clear: low running costs. But the HP doesn't seem to offer anything out of the ordinary to justify its price tag.

It's certainly good looking, while it's easy to use thanks to a 2.4in screen and intuitive buttons on the front panel. It's good to see the ability to print onto CDs and DVDs, and HP has sensibly put a slot beneath the paper tray to store the disc tray when you're not using it.

Another bonus is the photo tray, which can accept up to 7 x 5in paper. Plus, there's a selection of handy school documents you can print directly from the menus, including graph paper, lined paper and even sheet music. There are media card readers, but no USB port for connecting PictBridge cameras.

Tricolour and black cartridges are included, but you can install a 348 photo cartridge for six-colour printing. However, it's difficult to notice an improvement in photo quality when the extra three colours are added - photos will satisfy all but the most demanding users.

General print quality isn't bad, but it's hard to get excited about the C5280's output. Text is fine for most purposes, but there's a touch of spidering around characters, and this is also true of copies. It isn't particularly fast, either, with a mono pace of just 3.7ppm at normal quality. Colour speed is better: 5.2ppm is above average and the quality is better than its mono counterpart.

The scanner is reasonably quick, but the quality is again disappointing. Look closely at scans and you'll find a rough appearance to what are supposed to be flat edges. This left some images almost unusable.

When choosing an all-in-one printer for the home, you have plenty of options, almost all of which cost a lot less than £116. For this price, we'd expect a network port, wireless adapter or - at the very least - superlative print and scan quality. The Photosmart C5280 offers none of this and is best avoided unless the price drops dramatically in the future.

Author: David Bayon