Review: HP Photosmart C5280 multifunction device

HP has a big range of combined printer-scanners, with the Photosmart C5280 sitting in the middle, both in terms of price and features.

It’s smartly finished in grey and white with silver lines and a frosted black cover to the photo-feed tray.

Controls are lined up along its rounded front edge, avoiding the congestion that affects many of the more compact devices.

Plain paper feeds from a 125-sheet tray at the front and there is a 20-sheet photo tray above, which automatically slides into the printer when photo printing is selected.

Pull down a support from above the paper exit and you can load the supplied CD or DVD carrier for printing onto the surface of a disc. The carrier is neatly stored in a holder underneath the main paper tray.

At the left of the main controls is a 61mm colour screen that can show images from any memory card plugged into the internal card reader. Although there are four memory card slots for all the common cards, there’s no Pictbridge socket. This seems an odd omission of what's usually the easiest way to print photos - virtually any modern camera can connect to a Pictbridge printer using a USB cable and print directly.

Black pages in normal mode came out at around 5ppm (pages per minute) and colour at under 3ppm, so it's not particularly fast. Photo print quality was good but, surprisingly for an HP printer, black text print on plain paper was not, with quite a bit of ink bleeding into the paper.

The printer uses two cartridges, one black and the other containing three colours, but it's possible to replace the black with a photo cartridge for six-colour photos. With typical internet prices for HP's big cartridges worked out at 2.5p for a black A4 page and 5.1p for a colour one, both of which are very reasonable.

The well-integrated scanner, which adds remarkably little extra height to the C5280, takes a full A4 sheet without problem. There's no auto document feeder, but single scans are commendably quick and colour photocopies take under 40 seconds. Copy quality wasn't great, though, with copies coming through paler and less well-defined.

Vista compatible: Yes

See also:

Review: Canon Pixma MP210 multifunction device

Copy, print and scan without breaking the bank  29 Nov 2007

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