HP has built up a formidable reputation in the world of printing – the company has held both the inkjet and all-in-one A-List crowns for more than a year. But when a portfolio is as bursting at the seams as HP’s, it can be difficult to get new units noticed in the crowd.

The C5180 is aimed at what HP calls “busy, networked families”, with the tell-tale sign being a built-in Ethernet port. And if the family is so busy that it can’t wait to edit photos on the PC, there’s a multitude of memory card slots –including CompactFlash, SD card, xD-Picture card and Memory Stick – on offer, with a 2.4in LCD to preview the images. Note the lack of a PictBridge port, though.

When it comes to producing the results, the C5180’s output comfortably rivals that of a professional lab. Accurate skin tones, perfect colour gradients and unnoticeable amounts of grain mean that any size print, from 6 x 4in to A4, will look exactly as it should.

Canon’s current crop of inkjets holds the advantage over HP’s when it comes to mono text, but the C5180’s results are still impressively close to those of lasers. Speed is underwhelming, though, with our 5% ink coverage documents emerging at a rate of just six per minute. Dropping print quality to draft level sped things up to a laser-like 15ppm, but at the obvious expense of text quality.

Printing costs have been a contro­versial area for HP: despite us validating its highly-efficient ink cartridge claims, we found that when using its highest-quality consumables the prints were the most expensive on the market - $1.84 for a 6 x 4in photo when using Premium Plus paper. But the six-ink Vivera system still offers good fade resistance and few will grumble about the quality garnered from its value pack which comprises 150 sheets of 6 x 4in Advanced photo paper and six cartridges – a respectable 65c per print.

Scans from the 2400 x 4800dpi scanner are acceptable, although not market leading. Our test images were often over-exposed, and HP’s TWAIN driver offers a mediocre amount of information. There’s nothing so wrong with the images that they can’t be fixed post-scan, but those with enormous batches of photos to archive will want a scanner that simply gets it right first time. Speed is a significant plus – we had a preview in seven seconds, and a 10 x 8in print fully scanned, at 600dpi, in 1min 10secs.

The C5180 is still an excellent device: print quality is superb and the lack of speed is counterbalanced by a potential low cost per page. But the market is crowded, and the C5180 can’t move out of the shadow of the slightly-cheaper Photosmart 3110. The latter has a higher-resolution scanner. In fact, the C5180’s only real benefit is that it’s slightly smaller.