HP's first round of dedicated photo printers - the small, toaster-shaped ones you can print from directly using your camera - have been a big success, so it's hardly surprising that the company would want to refresh the format. There aren't many innovations possible in this product type, but HP has probably chosen the best of them, by increasing the maximum print size of its latest Photosmart A618.

The new printer can produce 18 x 13cm (7 x 5-inch) prints, often referred to as 'jumbo' by traditional photo developers. Even so, the only external difference in shape is an increase in the width of the printer, to accommodate the wider paper.

The Photosmart A618 has a hinged, 60mm LCD screen in the centre of its top panel to preview and select the pictures you want to print. To the right of this there's a four-way ring-button with an 'OK' button in the middle to navigate the menus, and to the left is a cluster of four more buttons. These select options like PhotoFix and layouts for multiple pictures per sheet. Other buttons are scattered around the top panel.

As with previous HP Photosmart printers, the front panel folds down to become an output tray and the back panel only opens a crack, to load up to 20 sheets of glossy photo paper. Inside the front panel there are two pairs of memory card slots and a PictBridge socket, as well as a small cover which opens to reveal a single, three-colour ink cartridge.

HP's Vivera inks are claimed to offer brighter, more dynamic prints and the photos we produced were good in both loud and more subtle hues. Well-lit objects were sharp and clear, though some shadowed detail was lost, even with HP's PhotoFix correction which is supposed to improve this.

The other HP claim that didn't quite ring true was the print speed. "As fast as 53 seconds", said the box, but printing 10 x 15cm prints in normal mode we couldn't better 1m:45s, and we don't believe the 53 seconds quote even for draft mode. An 18 x 13cm print took over 2m:10s.

HP has followed the trend and sells consumables for the Photosmart A618 in a pack including a cartridge and enough paper to print 120 pictures, for £21.58. This gives a cost per print of 18p, which is an economical price and one of the best we've seen for inkjet photos. It's convenient to know the ink will last about as long as the paper, too.

HP's Photosmart A618 is an evolutionary printer. It takes the technology that's proved successful in earlier HP photo devices and stretches it a bit, geometrically, to take wider paper. It's cheap to run, reasonably cheap to buy and produces prints that are above average, but not quite the best of breed.