Labs

Of all the printers in this group, HP's Photosmart C6380 is the most stylish. In ice-white, silver and light grey, it fits in with most recent Macs. Both plain paper and photo blanks can be loaded into the twin trays at the front and the MFD powers the photo tray forward when it's needed. All pages feed out onto the top cover of the photo tray.

At the top left is a 61mm colour LCD, with menu navigation controls next to a strip of buttons for copying, scanning and printing photos from its card slots or PictBridge. As well as USB and Ethernet, the C6380 supports wireless connectivity, although we found

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that this wasn't easy to set up.

As with the Canon Pixma MP630, speeds are hampered by a lot of fidgeting around before printing starts. We assume this is essential cartridge priming, but previous models didn't do it. Recorded speeds for black text print was 7.1ppm and 3.5ppm for text and colour graphics. Although good, these are not close to the spec-sheet figures. A colour copy came through in 42 seconds and a 15 x 10cm print took one minute 41 seconds.

Text print quality was sharp and clean, with little sign of jaggies or ink feathering. Colour graphics were strong and exact, with no visible dither patterns and good registration of black text over colour. Our colour photocopy came out a little lighter than the original, but was still better than most. This reflects scanner quality, which is traditionally a strength of HP all-in-ones. It gave a high level of detail and reproduced colours well, so is fine for photo print scanning.

Ink cartridges come in both standard and high-yield varieties, with the XL consumables offering 750 to 800 pages, which is rather generous for an inkjet. Page costs come out at an excellent 1.9p for black and a respectable 6.1p for colour.