HP's DeskJet 5740 is almost as good at printing photos as a dedicated photo printer. It's equally impressive at handling text, making it a fine all-around choice for home, home office, or small business use. Its output speeds are somewhat slow, but its versatility more than makes up for the touch of sluggishness.

This lightweight, compact printer is easy to set up. It has a 100-sheet paper input tray and a 50-sheet output tray. The input tray folds up when not in use to save a little space. Buttons on the front of the 5740 provide easy access to all print controls, and an ink status light lets you know when you're running low.

The 5740 ships with a tricolor inkjet cartridge and a black inkjet cartridge. You can swap the black cartridge for an optional photo cartridge for the best-quality photos. Print speeds will be a little slower, but the output quality is well worth the wait. The supplied HP Photo Printing software (Windows only) provides some basic photo enhancement tools, including rotate, crop, resize and adjust color.

The 5740 supplies black printing resolutions of up to 1,200 dpi and color printing resolutions of up to 4,800X1,200 dpi. It can handle the usual paper sizes and stocks, including letter, legal, envelopes, labels, and transparencies, as well as banners up to 8-1/2X24 inches. It can also print 4X6-inch, 5X7-inch and 8X10-inch photos, with or without borders. Per-page printing costs are a little high, although not out of line for an inkjet.

Text quality is above average for an inkjet printer. With a few specific font exceptions, text is readable and reasonable sharp even at small font sizes, not something you can usually say about an inkjet printer, particularly one at the low end of the price spectrum.

The DeskJet 5740 low-priced package includes a power cord, power supply, set-up poster, black inkjet cartridge, tricolor inkjet cartridge, printer software (for both Windows and Macintosh), HP Photo Printing software (Windows only) and electronic user guide.

The DeskJet 5740 is the printer package for you if you are concerned about cost and print quality, and speed of printing is not a primary concern.

Pro: Above-average image and text quality. Optional photo cartridge helps provide the best-quality photos, although photos are better than average even with standard ink cartridges.
Con: Print speeds are a little slow, especially for photos. No media card slots.

FOR MORE INFORMATION
Hewlett-Packard
3000 Hanover Street
Palo Alto, CA 94304-1185
650-857-1501
http://www.hp.com

Warranty
1 year limited