Labs

The C5280 cost £149 when it was released in June, but HP has halved its price as part of a promotion set to last until January. As soon as you've installed the ink and powered up the printer for the first time, it aligns the print head automatically. This and other maintenance tasks are available at any time through the menu system and integrated colour screen.

There's a separate tray for photo paper, which is selected automatically when you opt to print in smaller photo sizes. Unusually for a printer that emphasises photo printing,

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the C5280 uses a combined three-colour cartridge, although a photo cartridge is available. Print costs are reasonable if you buy high-yield inks, but low-yield costs are expensive. We quote the high-yield costs in our graphs on page 106.

The C5280's draft print speed is the fastest here, and the print quality rivalled the normal output of some other printers. Normal-quality speeds were average, but text was well defined, and we waited only 22 seconds for a single page. Our mixed-colour document appeared slowly, but images and text were sharp and accurate. We had trouble lining up the A4 paper, though, so some prints were askew.

On photo paper, pale shades and flesh tones were accurate and vivid, but dark colours looked washed out. When copying, the C5280 took almost a minute to produce a colour copy, and yellow tones were too intense. Text on both colour and mono copies was fuzzy.

The scanner can produce high-resolution images, but scans took ages at 1,200dpi and above. Colours were accurate, but images were grainy at 100 per cent magnification and lines looked rippled in our 300dpi document scan.