HP Photosmart D5460

Budget-minded photo enthusiasts will appreciate the standard features of this printer. Despite being a bare-bones printer in most respects, it has a few great features that anyone would love to have.

PC Magazine recently tested this printer and found that the Photosmart D5460 pushed paper quickly, managing a swift 11.4 pages per minute when printing text-only pages and 3.4 ppm when printing graphics. The main input tray holds just 125 sheets (lower than average), however, and it doesn’t accept legal-size media.

A nice addtion is a dedicated 20-sheet photo-paper tray, which handles paper sizes of up to 5 inches by 7 inches, and an integrated input tray and caddy for specially coated CD or DVD media. The CD/DVD input tray nests within the printer’s front bay and pulls down easily for use.

The inks are impressively economical, too. The Photosmart D5460 ships with regular-size (130- to 300-page) cartridges for all five inks, but HP sells high-capacity versions of all colors. The regular-size cyan cartridge, for instance, costs $10 and lasts about 300 pages (per HP), which works out to an affordable 3.3 cents per page. The 750-page (by HP’s estimate) cyan cartridge costs $15–or just 2 cents per page.