Hewlett Packard 1315

The 1315 marks the coming of age of Hewlett Packard's Photosmart range. To the side are slots for Compact Flash Types I and II, Smartmedia and Memory Stick, making this the most versatile photo printer on the market.

A 2.5in (diagonal) LCD displays the media's contents and lets you select how they should be printed without you needing to touch your PC. From here you can also use the buttons and five-way navigator to make simple adjustments to the colour, orientation and size of the output.

Index sheets can be produced with just three button presses, and the Digital Print Order Format functionality lets you select which photos to print while they are still in your camera.

A serious rival to the Epson Stylus Photo 895 in the simplicity stakes, it features the most comprehensive hardware controller we have seen.

PC connection is by USB or parallel cable and there's an infrared port to the front for beaming in pictures from a Photosmart camera. An added bonus is the absence of a power brick - the lead plugs straight into the unit - and it's Mac compatible.

A paper sensor sets the best driver options, and on photo paper it ups the resolution to 2,400 x 1,200dpi. This undoubtedly helped in the photo-printing test; the colours were bright and vibrant without being saturated.

There was no evidence of banding and, where bright and dark colours met at a sharp edge, there was no bleeding of the dominant tone. The A4 print completed in a respectable five minutes two seconds. This puts it fourth in a pack of nine in our inkjet group test.

Text quality on photocopy paper was excellent; characters were bold and crisp with no evidence of feathering. At standard quality it printed 50 pages in 15 minutes 56 seconds, well ahead of the competition.

PRICE: £299 (£254.46 ex VAT)

CONTACT: Hewlett Packard
08705 474 747
www.hp.com/uk