HP Deskjet D2560

Design
Testing the technology we see at CNET can involve a variety of processes, but shopping is rarely one of these. When we opened the box containing the HP Deskjet D2560 printer this reviewer laughed at the reference in the user guide suggesting that a necessary USB cable may not be included, finding the notion humorous that HP would skimp on an essential connection and render the printer unusable out of the box. The laughing stopped, of course, when there was no USB cable to be found.

This is actually common practice with desktop printers, allowing department stores to make high mark ups on the cables they can then upsell to you. One hour and 10 dollars later we had a USB cable to continue our testing. Aside from this irritation, the rest of setting up the D2560 was a breeze, with the clear instruction map — a common feature amongst desktop printers — easily guiding up through the various steps of removing packing tape and installing the ink cartridges.

The D2560 is lightweight, which is handy, but doesn't feel very solidly built. It features a very common desktop printer style, but it's not as cute or alluring as the Canon Selphy CP770. The D2560 features only three input keys on the left-hand side of the front of the machine; a power button, plus buttons to cancel printing and to resume operation.

Features
The D2560 is as bare bones a printer as you're likely to find. It features the single USB input at the back of the box and no additional memory card reader inputs, like SD or CF card formats, so unlike printers that feature these additional inputs, you're basically left using your PC as the intermediary. This also means there is no use for an external LCD monitor similar to other higher priced desktop printers. HP estimate that the paper tray can hold 80 blank pages before becoming congested, which is more than sufficient for students printing university essays, or similar everyday printing tasks.

The D2560 comes bundled with Photosmart Essential photo printing software. Its installation is simple enough but using this software requires a bit more thought than we think is necessary, with users having to create Photosmart libraries of images before printing, rather than simply selecting photos from folders.

Performance
We began testing the print quality with full pages of black text before moving to a selection of colour photos. Printing full A4 test pages, the D2560 managed a sluggish four pages per minute, but at least it printed these pages quietly. Unlike the speedy Kodak ESP 5 we reviewed recently, the HP D2560 is the tortoise rather than the hare, slowly, steadily and silently printing high quality copies of the text.

When we turned our attention to colour photos the D2560 got off to a rocky start: chewing two consecutive pieces of paper past its print heads and jamming. The D2560 tried its best to handle the paper jams, whirring and trying to feed the paper out, but still required human intervention to clear the paper path. Beyond these initial hiccups the D2560 continued without trouble, printing 6x4-inch prints in just under one and a half minutes, and printing a full A4-sized photo in four minutes and 40 seconds — again slow and steady.

Putting the stopwatch aside, the photo quality we've seen is dismal. Uniformly across all the photos printed, regardless of the origin of the picture, the D2560 loses so much detail in the prints that photos are barely worth passing through this printer. Faces are lost in shadows, depth is flattened, and the range of original colours crushed to an uninspiring palette. If you're in the market for a photo-quality printer you're going to need to spend a bit more money than the AU$59 asking price for the HP Deskjet D2560.

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