Product ReviewsPrinters
HP's latest All-in-One printer, the Photosmart C5280 has just hit the dealers' shelves and as you might expect from HP, it ticks most of the right boxes. It's a 4800 x 1200dpi inkjet with built-in 4800dpi A4 flatbed scanner. It has a 2.4in colour LCD plus slots for CF, SD, XD and Memory Stick memory cards for direct photo printing. Its sister printer, the C5180, is about £20 dearer and has the same basic spec plus the luxury of an Ethernet port. The quoted price for this printer seemed to be a movable feast at the time of writing. HP is running a £50-off deal at present, while the cheapest street prices hover around the £95 mark. Either way, at this price, the C5280 offers great value for money for an all-in-one device. Which is just as well, as you'll need to fork out at least for one non-optional extra - the required USB cable was conspicuous by its absence. Most all-in-one (AIO) printers look as if they've had a close encounter with the ugly stick but its immediately clear that this AIO has come nowhere near one. The C5280 is a sleek, gloss white and grey curvaceous affair, with detail picked out in silver. Heaven forgive us for saying this but you might just get away with having this one in the lounge. By default the C5280 ships with a tricolour print cartridge but if you want to major in colour photos then you'll need to invest in a Vivera photo cartridge. Cartridges aren't dear but lack capacity. The standard black cartridge goes for £11 and can print 200 pages, that's 5.5p per page. Colour cartridges sell for £13 and can print 170 pages with a per page cost of 7.6p. You'd be better off buying the XL versions - these have much better capacity and reduce page costs to a more reasonable 2.1p and 3.9p respectively. This might be a cheap AIO but it is not entirely devoid of clever 'nice-to-have' features. Aside from the genuinely useful LCD display and the memory reader slots, the C5280 has a separate paper tray sitting above the main paper bin. This exclusively holds 20 sheets of photo paper up to 10 x 15cm, which eliminates the common palaver of having to swap paper just to print a one-off snap from a memory card. It can also print labels directly on to suitable CDs and DVDs. A DVD/CD caddy is tucked under the main paper tray - you simply slide this out and drop in a printable
On the downside there are some glaring feature omissions. It's USB only, and lacks duplex printing and PictBridge support. It also has a large brick universal power supply. Given the size of this AIO, it's a shame HP couldn't find room to build in the power brick. Still at this price we can't complain too much. The C5280 comes with Photosmart Essential Software, which takes about 10 minutes to install. PC users get the benefit of the Read Iris OCR package plus Roxio Express Labeller for printing CD labels. Head alignment is completely automatic but this didn't result in laser-quality text. While it was quite able to cleanly produce text as small as 4pt, perversely shortcomings become noticeable only on larger point sizes, with evidence of bleeding, wicking and spatter here and there. Solid colours were dealt with well, with barely a hint of banding. Photo printing was a complete contrast, with good, clean output, featuring well-saturated, smoothly graduated colours. We don't know how HP measures the speed of its printers but the method is in severe need of a reality check. Its claims of 'up to' 32ppm and 24ppm for black and colour prints respectively, are well wide of the mark. Even if it had accidentally left out a decimal point those figures would still be optimistic. Printing out a five-page, text-only Word document took a shade under two minutes, working out at 2.5ppm, 'up to' 29.5ppm less than HP's claims. We expect colour print printing to be relatively slow and the C5280 didn't disappoint here - it took 3min 50sec to print out an A4 Getty Images test photo, not excessively long but hardly blistering. Its copy function proved a little more impressive - an A4 colour copy took 43sec to emerge, dropping to 32sec for a monochrome copy. When copying you can resize within a range of 50% to 400%, change the output quality and make up to 50 copies at once. You can even crop the image and view the result on the LCD. You can also scan to a memory card or Mac. It's during copying that an irritating aspect of this AIO becomes noticeable - it's a noisy little devil. While not quite as loud as a poorly maintained pizza-delivery scooter, the scanner-head stepper motor does have a particularly graunchy action. This combined with a louder than usual print head motor makes for noisy copying. That gripe aside, the copies were really pretty good given this AIO's sub-£100 price. Overall the C5280 delivers good graphics and photo-print quality, not to mention excellent colour scans. And it can print directly on to CDs. It's dead easy to use too. Its text performance isn't up to snuff and it lacks a PictBridge port. Nevertheless, overall, the C5280 doesn't disappoint at this price - it's a good choice for occasional domestic use on a budget. By Roger Gann
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