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HP claims speeds of up to 10ppm when printing in an equivalent quality mode to laser print. This is normal mode on this machine and in our tests it completed a five-page black text print in 35 seconds. This is equivalent to 8.57ppm, unexpectedly close to the claimed print speed. In draft mode, our 20-page document took 1 minute 16 seconds, giving 15.8ppm against the rated speed of 36ppm. We can't see how this printer could ever achieve over 30ppm.

Our black text and colour graphics print, again a five-page job, took 53 seconds, giving 5.66ppm. A 15 x 10cm photo print at best quality took 1:33, but printed in normal mode, this reduced to just 43 seconds.

If you compare all these speeds with a mono laser printer costing about the same to buy, HP's own LaserJet P1006, for example, you're looking at a real-world print speed of 12.5ppm for black text and 11.1ppm for text and graphics, though these are all greyscale speeds. This machine is therefore only about two thirds as fast as the LaserJet.

If, instead, you compare the OfficeJet Pro K5400n with a budget colour laser, such as the Lexmark C500n, which costs around £180, its top black print speed is 13.0ppm and colour comes through at about 6ppm. The colour print speed of both machines is therefore very similar.

As you might expect, the output quality from this colour inkjet is pretty good. Black text is dense and truly black, though there is some ink creep into the fibres of the standard multi-purpose paper we use for all our print tests.

The real difference in quality comes in the colour print samples, though, where the range of available inkjet colours far exceeds that of typical lasers. Prints may not be as sharp from the inkjet, but in colour business graphics and, more especially, in our colour photo test samples, images come through far more vibrant and lifelike than from a laser. The only area where we could fault the inkjet print is in shadow detail, where many of the darker shades veer to black.

HP claims this printer can cost half as much to run as an equivalent laser printer. Using its high-capacity Value cartridges, which give the best economy, it produces a black page cost of 1.59p and a colour cost of 4.30p. The equivalent figures from the Lexmark C500n are 2.78p and 9.74p, so HP's claim seems fair. It really can cost quite a bit less to run this machine than a colour laser printer and in this comparison the inkjet has a purchase price of less than half the price of the laser machine, too.

Verdict

Inkjet printers have improved considerably in the last couple of years and the semi-permanent print head technology HP introduced about then has filtered down to machines costing substantially less than £100. This gives the advantages of high print speed and low running costs to a technology which also outshines laser print in some areas, particularly photo reproduction.

Although the OfficeJet Pro K5400n itself is not particularly well geared to photographic print, it's more than adequate as a general-purpose office printer in a SOHO or even low-end SME environment.

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