HP Officejet Pro K5400n in Printers

The Officejet Pro clearly isn't targeted at home users. It'll barely even fit on most desks, despite being only an A4 device. And while £63 won't break the bank, it's still one of the most expensive printers here. However, the Officejet Pro has a lot to offer.

It's designed for small offices, so throughput is excellent. Its standard-quality print rates of 11.5ppm in mono and 7.2ppm for colour put the competition to shame - its nearest rival, the Pixma iP4500, managed 10ppm and 3.9ppm respectively.

The Officejet also came top in the draft mode test, turning out 19.5ppm to beat even the Epson Stylus Photo R285 - and with much cleaner results. Admittedly, text was on the grey side and some letters were slightly deformed - but readability as a whole was good. Switching to standard quality made the letters crisp and precise, and turned the greys into a good, weighty black.

Our colour document also came out sharp, with excellent contrast and nice bright colours on plain paper. Some shades did suffer slightly from speckling.

The Officejet isn't sold as a photo printer, but on glossy paper its output was rich and solid, with far smoother dithering than the Photosmart D7460. Its only weakness was very pale shades, where it couldn't achieve the subtlety that light cyan and light magenta inks permit. But overall our only real criticism of the K5400n's photo printing is its speed: a minute and a half for a 6 x 4in photo is just too slow.

One final plus point, though: it's economical to run at just 13p per photo - equalling the performance of the iP4500 in terms of running costs. If you run the printer to 40,000 pages you'll have to shell out around £60 for new print heads, but very few will drive their printers that hard.

For domestic use, it's hard to overlook the Officejet's size and cost. It also lacks home comforts like PictBridge and CD printing. Instead, you pay for very useful business features: built-in Ethernet, so it doesn't have to be tethered to your desk; a 250-sheet feeder so you don't need to constantly refill it with paper. And perhaps more important, the K5400n's speed and quality is hard to ignore.

Author: David Bayon