The HP is certainly good looking, and it’s easy to use thanks to a 2.4in screen and intuitive buttons on the front panel. It’s good to see the ability to print onto CDs and DVDs, and HP has sensibly put a slot beneath the paper tray to store the disc tray when you’re not using it.

Another bonus is the photo tray, which can accept up to 7 x 5in paper. Plus, there’s a selection of handy school documents you can print directly from the menus, including graph paper, lined paper and even sheet music. There are media card readers, but no USB port for connecting PictBridge cameras.

Tricolour and black cartridges are included, but you can also install a 99-photo cartridge for six-colour printing or a 100-photo grey cartridge for top-class black and white photos. However, it’s difficult to notice an improvement in photo quality when the extra three colours are added – regular photos will satisfy all but the most demanding users. We’re also concerned that to make full use of HP’s photo fade resistance (using its best Premium Plus photo paper) HP recommends letting prints dry for a ridiculous seven days before using them. Kodak’s pigment-based prints dry almost instantly and offer even better fade resistance on a much wider variety of papers.

General print quality isn’t bad, but it’s hard to get excited about the C5280’s output. Text is fine for most purposes, but there’s a touch of spidering around characters, and this is also true of copies. It isn’t particularly fast, either, with a mono pace of just 3.7ppm at normal quality. Colour speed is better: 5.2ppm is above average and the quality is better than its mono counterpart.

The scanner is reasonably quick, but the quality is again disappointing. Look closely at scans and you’ll find a rough appearance to what are supposed to be flat edges. This left some images almost unusable.

When choosing an all-in-one printer for the home, you have plenty of options, and while the price, looks and some of the features of the C5280 may tempt many people, other competitors offer better performance in other key areas. The Canon wins for quality and speed, the Kodak is great for photos and the Epson is great for scanning. Even the Lexmark beats it for running costs with its 9c per page versus HP’s 11.6c. This leaves the HP as an unexciting prospect, albeit one that offers reasonable value.