Design
What is white, boxy in shape and is rather dull looking? A printer, of course! The HP Deskjet F4280 All-in-One printer is no different in design from most multifunction devices on the market. It's a rather plain-looking curved rectangular box in white and grey with buttons along the top left side.
This simplicity of design is also passed on to its usage with LEDs rather than an LCD on the control panel (displaying the print cartridge levels and copy settings). Oh, there's also a button for cancelling or resuming print jobs.
The scanner is at the top with a sturdy hinge that holds the lid, but is not adjustable to fit books, only A4-sized sheets. At the front of the printer is a fold-out tray for both input and output, which is slightly flimsy and can easily be snapped off if you have it hanging off the edge of your desk. Luckily, the F4280 doesn't take up that much space, measuring 161.5x437.5x290.4mm, which will fit quite nicely on most desks.
Features
There isn't much to the F4280. A USB cable and AC adapter are the only connections — no Ethernet, memory card slots or Bluetooth connectivity.
This printer is not designed for large print jobs as the paper tray holds up to 80 pages with an out capacity of 50, so it's more suited to personal use or students.
The F4280 ships with two introductory ink cartridges — black and tri-colour — which only managed about 60 pages of print before the black ran out, so we advise that you buy ink at the same time you buy this printer.
Performance
Installation was a breeze taking no more than 20 minutes from taking it out of the box to aligning the print head and loading the software. Then simply connect the printer using the supplied USB cable and it's ready to go.
The F4280's resolution did well with small text and fine details in images; however, in Draft mode, don't expect very good results. In Normal mode, our first test page (black and white text, no graphics) was ejected from the printer in 10 seconds and then continued at a slow seven pages per minute (ppm). We achieved 5ppm in colour with graphics (also in Normal mode).
With an image resolution of 4,800x1,200dpi, printing text came out with almost laser-like precision — text was legible down to the smallest point sizes. Photos, however, displayed some graininess and greyscale prints came out with the slightest hint of yellow, but all up, results were really good for an inkjet printer. Unfortunately, in Normal mode the ink was slightly wet and prone to smudging.
When printing in Fast Draft mode printing speeds in both black and white and colour increased to 14ppm and 10ppm respectively — that's a reasonably good result that isn't far off the mark from HP's claimed speeds of 20ppm and 14ppm.
However, in Fast Draft mode text didn't quite line up correctly with some lines appearing wonky — probably due to the way the printer pulls in the sheet of paper as it prints at that speed. We tried to align the print head again as instructed in the set-up guide, but still got the same results.
We also noticed that when HP's software showed ink levels reaching halfway, the printer's indicator lights only went down by one out of the four bars. The only time they both coincided is when the black ink levels ran out.
If you were to look at your print pages based on cost per page printed and using HP's high-yield ink cartridge it comes to an estimated four cents per page for black ink and 12 cents per page for colour. The high-yield ink for black and colour only lasts an estimated 600 and 440 pages respectively. It's an altogether affordable printer if you don't print very often.
Based on the reasonable results from the printer, we were looking forward to testing the scanner but were deeply disappointed. It took around 20 seconds to scan and upload an image (this will obviously vary depending on the PC you're using; our test machine had a 2.33GHz Intel Core 2 Duo). Photos that were scanned displayed a lot of noise and colours were darker than the actual image while whites tended to have a yellow tinge. If scanning and copying are your main tasks, we'd recommend you look at another multifunction.
When compared to other multifunction devices and printers in general on the market, the F4280 is a viable and good choice for people who will primarily be printing text pages and the occasional snapshot.
