HP Deskjet F2280

Very much an entry-level multifunction right down to its finishing, the F2280 from HP features a very simple look, with a sober white and gray case, no LCD screen and just a couple of controls on the printer itself.

One benefit of the stripped-down styling is that the F2280 is a small, compact form factor.

Printing Speed

The printing speeds offered on this multifunction are a little slower than those offered by most of its competition. 

In draft mode, it rarely gets above 15 pages per minute (ppm) in black and white, even though HP claims speeds of up to 20 ppm. 

For standard mode, this is closer to 5.6 ppm for monochrome printing and a mere 4.2 ppm in color.

It goes without saying that high end printers can outperform this paltry showing, sometimes going twice as fast, but even other printers at the roughly the same price point, like the Epson Stylus SX205 do better.

Photo printing is even slower, with a 4 x 6'' print taking 1 minute 20 seconds and a full color A4 print dragging on for 3 minutes 20 seconds.

Quality

For office printing, two modes are available for black and white printing.

The first, 'black ink only', does not offer as good results as the 'high quality' mode, but is a lot faster.

'High quality' mode lives up to its name, with deep blacks and sharp characters.

Unlike on some better models, you really can't use draft mode for standard printing, as ink drops remain visible and blacks are too light and look gray.

As for photo printing, the quality is average.   Ink drops remain  visible, and black and white photos show dark grays that are too green.  Lighter grays, though, are more even.

Like the from Epson, this is a very noisy printer.

Cartridges

HP is sticking with its all-in-one cartridges for color printing, so if you run out of one color of ink, you'll have to replace the whole thing.

The cheaper standard cartridges jack up the cost per page, which is much more reasonable with the XL cartridges.

Compared with standard cartridges, these XL versions are very economic, really improving the cost per page.

The wildly differing performances between these two different types of cartridge throw into relief the false economy of buying cheap multifunction inkjets: if you are only going to print occasionally, then that's fine, but if you intend to use your printer, then you'd be better buying a printer that 's more expensive upfront but which will cost less in the long run.