HP Photosmart C4480

HP has several, small inkjet multi-function printer-scanners, but the chepest one to have a colour display is the Photosmart C4480.

This smart white and grey machine has a well-designed control panel, using the small screen along with three soft keys to control many of its functions.

There are two memory card slots, which between them handle SD, Memorystick and XD formats and next to these is the paper tray, which folds down to handle both input and output paper stacks. Paper feeds in from the front and ends up on top of the input stack, held on a clear-plastic divider that swivels out from the lip of the front cover.

The twin ink cartridges plug in behind the front cover, which took only a couple of moments, and the supplied software includes optical character recognition (OCR) technology for extracting text from scanned pages. The CIS scanner produced good-quality images for a device of its type.

HP reckons on speeds of 8.9 pages per minute (ppm) for colour and 5.3ppm for black and pages. Our own tests, which include processing time for preparing the page (the quoted tests don't) returned speeds of 6.1ppm and 2.1ppm, both good for the price. A 15x10cm photo took 77 seconds, also good, and a single-page A4 copy took 50 seconds, which wasn’t so impressive.

The key test of any device like this is the quality of the prints it produces. There's nothing wrong with the Photosmart C4480 on that front, as it came out with good, clean black text and bright colour graphics, although they were a little pale. Reproduction of black text over colour was near-perfect and colour photocopies were again a bit pale but acceptable for this price.

Photo prints were good with plenty of detail even in the hard-to-reproduce darker areas of images. Colours were natural and areas of varying colour, like skies, blended smoothly with no signs of banding.

The cartridges are available in two capacities, Standard and Value, the Value cartridge having more ink. Our calculations for the value pack put costs per page at 3.2p for black and 7.8p for colour, which are both at least a penny less than most rivals.