HP Deskjet D2560 review

The diminutive HP was the smallest of the inkjets we tested for the first time this month, but on lifting it from its box we were reassured by a sense of sturdiness.

It's aimed at home users, yet sports the bland grey uniform of an office machine. Its styling is nothing to write home about, but pleasantly unobtrusive.

Setp was straightforward, with the printer recognised instantly by Windows and the driver installed without fuss. While all the printers came with some form of extra creativity software, HP's Photosmart Essentials was the best of the bunch, enabling you to carry out basic photo editing tasks before you output your snaps. HP's driver keeps things simple by offering a few task-oriented choices, enabling you to specify the type of document you're printing and the type of paper.

Where the Epson D120 and Lexmark have input trays at the front and rear, offering the paper a relatively straight path through the printer, the HP's input and output trays are both at the front, so the paper has to turn through a full 180 degrees to come back out. This could curl heavier paper stock.

In our tests, the HP took slightly longer to start printing than the other budget models, but with just 12 seconds elapsing before our first page came out, it really didn't make a lot of difference. The Deskjet was slightly noisier than the Epson D120, but didn't have us reaching for our earplugs.

What did perturb us slightly was its habit of snatching paper unceremoniously from the input tray. In the case of our first print job, this led to a paper jam - our fault, as it happened, because we hadn't ensured the paper guides were precisely aligned, but it goes to show you'll need to take a little care.

The HP took a minute and 24 seconds, a little longer than its rivals, to output our 10 page text document at the normal setting. This was slashed to a mere 39 seconds in draft mode, with very little reduction in quality, so if you need speed you can have it. Photo printing was slower than with the Lexmark, but we appreciated the quality of the results. The HP's output wasn't quite as delicate or neutral as that of the Epson, but made fleshtones look pleasantly warm and colours vivid, which you'll appreciate if you're printing holiday snaps or marketing materials rather than colour-critical artwork.

With decent, fast text and superb image quality at a very low price, the HP D2560 is a new Best Buy in its class.