HP's small photo printer aims to be a neat solution for those specifically interested in digital photography and home printing. About the size - though not the weight - of a house brick, HP's Photosmart 230 printer is a self-contained device, which can be used with or without a PC connected.

A feed tray folds down from the front of the printer and you load this with HP's 100mm by 150mm glossy photo paper sheets. The printer feeds these to the back of the machine, before feeding them forward again and printing on them, to eject at the front, on top of the blank sheets.

You can control the printer from a small panel set into its top. With buttons in front of a small, colour LCD display, you can select the images you want to print and even apply effects, such as sepia tint and patterned borders to them. The printer can also produce borderless prints, looking very much like those you'd get from a high-street photo lab.

Print quality is excellent, with sharp, well-defined detail and natural colours, corresponding well to those shown on the printer's display or on your PC screen. The printer connects to a PC via a USB cable and the supplied software is great for organising images on your hard drive, as well as for sending them to the printer.

Print speed is not that good, with a 100mm by 150mm print taking around two and a half minutes to complete. A set of 25 prints would take nearly an hour. This is definitely a printer for single-print convenience, rather than high production rates.

The cost of running the Photosmart 230 breaks down into two parts. The single, three-colour ink cartridge costs around £30 and should be good for 125 prints. On top of this is the cost of a pack of 60 sheets of 100mm by 150mm paper, typically around £15.

This gives a cost per print of 49p, which is high when measured against other printers of the type. HP should look at reducing the cost of its consumables, which still represents too large a proportion of the cost of the printer itself.

If you want a specialist printer for producing photo-print sized images, the Photosmart 230 is both convenient and well-featured. You can use it with or without a PC connected to produce quality images. However, the penalty for this convenience is that it's slow to print and comparatively expensive to run.