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You often have to make do with sub-standard print when looking at results from a portable printer, but not here. Text print from the OfficeJet H470 is clean and with little spread into the fibres. Even small font sizes only show slight fuzziness around the edges.

Colour graphics are also clean and areas of solid colour fill are dense and generally free from stripes or other artefacts. Photo prints are well reproduced, with very little visible colour dither across varying colour tones and high levels of detail in both fully lit and partially lit photos. Colours are generally natural and photo prints are well up to the standard of HP's dedicated photo inkjets.

HP quotes print speeds for both black and colour of 1.5ppm. This is a cause for true amazement in the TrustedReviews team, as the speeds we saw were better in both cases in normal print mode. Our five-page, black text print completed in 59 seconds, giving a speed of 5.08ppm, while the colour text print, although taking longer at 2:07, still gives a real world speed of 2.36ppm.

We're not sure what the world's coming to when printer makers start quoting speeds which are not just realistic, but underestimate what their printers are capable of. The best 15 x 10cm photo print time we measured was 1:27, which compares favourably with, for example, the Photosmart A826, a dedicated photo printer which in best print mode, like the H470, took 1:35 for the same print.

The only costs in running the printer are the ink cartridges. They appear to be two nearly identical black cartridges, numbers 337 and 338, both of which are quoted as being 14ml cartridges and both of which seem to sell at approximately the same price. However, HP quotes the 338 cartridge as yielding 500 ISO pages, while the 337 yields only 440. Guess which cartridge we'd go for?

With the tri-colour cartridges, there's a definite difference between the 343 and 344, with the 344 quoted as yielding 600 pages. Using the two, higher-yielding cartridges gives page costs of 3p for black and 5.87p for colour; both these are good for a colour inkjet printer, especially one intended for the portable market.

Verdict

There's quite a bit going for this diminutive inkjet printer, though surprisingly size is not one of its killer features. It's easy to use and versatile if you opt for the WiFi or Bluetooth adapters and the lithium ion battery. It's a bit surprising that as a portable printer the battery isn't included as standard, but it's equally surprising that running costs are no higher than a standard desktop machine and that speeds, while unremarkable, are both higher than HP's claims.

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