Product Reviews

There's a definite trend among higher-end inkjet all-in-one makers to build touchscreens into their machines - we recently looked at one on Lexmark's Interact S605. The similarly priced Photosmart Premium C309g is a well-styled, all-black device, with a high-gloss scanner lid embossed with a geometric pattern similar to those on some of HP's recent laptops.

A straightforward Contact Image Sensor (CIS) flatbed scanner lies under the lid, while the more innovative control panel is positioned on the front. Apart from a single, physical push button for power and two LED indicators for wireless and Bluetooth connections, all the controls and indicators are built into the touchscreen panel.

A bright 89mm LCD display sits at the centre of the panel, with large, easy-to-understand icons for the major functions. The panel is very responsive, which makes it easy to select options and move sliders, although there's no attempt at gesture controls. A number of single-function touch indicators are ranged around the screen for functions such as cancelling a print job and returning to the home page.

Twin paper trays sit below the control panel - one for plain paper and the other for photo blanks, both of which can be loaded simultaneously, with the printer drawing the photo tray inside when you select this media. It's a bit annoying that the lid to the plain paper tray has no catch to hold it in the up position when you're loading paper, as previous models have. Printed pages feed to the top cover of the trays, but you have to pull out a long support and paper stop to prevent pages sliding onto the desk.

To the left of the paper trays are twin memory card slots for SD, MemoryStick and xD cards (but no CompactFlash), and a USB socket that serves both PictBridge cameras and USB drives. At the back are USB and Ethernet sockets, but most people will probably use the printer's wireless connection. This is very simple

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to set up, as the machine hunts for available wireless networks and then displays a keyboard on the touchscreen for entering a pass code. Software support is simple but effective, and printer installation can easily be completed in 10 minutes or so.

HP rates the Photosmart Premium C309g at 12ppm for mono prints and 9.5ppm for colour, but these speeds don't include processing time before print jobs start. You do have to wait until the processing is complete though, so we included this time in our speed ratings. Under this regime, the fastest speed we saw was 6.82ppm on our 10-page black text document. The five-page black text and colour graphics test returned a speed of 3.95ppm. These speeds are both reasonable for this class of machine, just not at the levels HP claims.

Worse though, is the duplex performance. The Photosmart Premium C309g waits for a full 20 seconds between finishing the first side of each page and starting the second to allow for ink drying. This is longer than most of its rivals and pulls the speed down to 2.7 sides per minute, which is pretty slow.

Photo print quality is as good as we've come to expect from HP, with sharp detail, natural colours and smooth gradations from shade to shade. Colours on plain paper are generally bright and clean, including from colour copies, where there's only slight loss of colour depth. Surprisingly, it's in plain, black print that the machine isn't as strong as some of its competitors. Although print is still reasonable, a slight fuzziness on character uprights is revealed as ink spatter when you look at the text under a loupe.

The five ink cartridges, all of which clip into a print head that swings into view when you hinge the scanner section of the machine up, are available in two capacities. The high-yield Value cartridges give better economy, but standard-yield ones are supplied. HP's support applet started reporting low ink levels after printing around 80 sides of our test documents, which is pretty meagre.

Based on the prices of the Value cartridges, we calculate page costs at 2.5p for black and 7.2p for colour, based on ISO yields. These costs are good, with the colour cost being particularly noteworthy, from 2p to 4p less than most of its rivals.

The Photosmart Premium C309g is an extremely easy-to-use machine and produces excellent photo images. There are some shortfalls, though, particularly in the duplex speed, and there's a question mark over page yields if the low ink warnings we saw are typical.