HP Photosmart 2575 review

HP has just updated its Photosmart range of printers and multifunction peripherals. The Photosmart 2575 is the most affordable of the photo-orientated multifunction range, but it still has a full complement of photo-printing features.

A standard Ethernet port means you can connect the 2575 to a network, but otherwise its USB port is fine for a single computer. Either installation is straightforward, but HP's bundled software requires at least 395MB of disk space and takes quite a while to install.

The Photosmart 2575 can print with six inks, which reduces the appearance of grain in photos, but this requires an optional photo cartridge. The printer accepts virtually all HP's Vivera ink range, including the grey photo cartridge and high-yield supplies. Using these, running costs are around 2.2p per mono page and 4.7p in colour, which is very low for an inkjet.

This multifunction peripheral performed really well in our print tests, completing our 50-page draft document at 19.5 ppm. Its speed dropped to 5.1ppm on our higher-quality letter test, but nonetheless this is still a solid performance. The 2575 was also quick when printing in colour, turning out our 24-page test document at more than 2ppm.

The quality of our plain paper results was very good, with crisp text and solid colours that had minimal banding. Photographs printed using the standard four-ink setup showed some grain, but they had high levels of detail and accurate colours. We found it simple to make prints from an SD card without using a PC.

Although the Photosmart's printer is well made, we were less keen on its scanner. The lid seems solid, but its hinge design doesn't allow it to close flat on over-sized originals. It was quite slow, taking 16.5 seconds to preview an A4 document and 39 seconds to capture it at 300 dots per inch (dpi). At 1,200dpi, it took one minute and 34 seconds to scan a 6x4" photograph.

The colours in our test scans were true to the original, but the scanner's focus wasn't perfect and our images looked soft. This was also noticeable in copies, which at the default setting took around 40 seconds in greyscale or colour.

The 2575 has a great printer and can easily be shared between multiple networked PCs. However, its scan performance is below par for this price.