HP's inkjet printers have lost some of their house style and each range now has a distinctly different look. The DeskJet 5850 has a steeply curved front and smoked acrylic cover, so you can see printing as it happens. It takes two of HP's new ink cartridges, one black and the other tri-colour, but can take an optional three-colour photo cartridge in place of the black, to provide six-colour photo printing.

The DeskJet 5850 is very versatile in the way it connects to your PC, with Ethernet and Wi-Fi (802.11b) connections as well as USB 2. You can connect wirelessly in infrastructure or ad hoc modes and with varying degrees of security. Most useful of all, you can connect all three ports and send to the printer through each. If it sees jobs coming through more than one port at once, it processes them in turn.

As is usual with HP printers, paper feeds from the front of the machine, performs a 180-degree turn and ejects to a second tray, positioned above the first. The output tray has a rather flimsy, telescopic support which you need to extend if you don't want paper feeding onto the floor.

The printer comes as standard with a 'two-sided printing accessory' (duplexer) and an additional 25-sheet paper tray can be added under the printer, to supplement its standard 150-sheet tray. This makes is suitable for micro-business use, as well as for home and home office.

Printing is both quiet and quick, with extra optimisation of line lengths when text printing, so the page jerks forward surprisingly rapidly. Even so, under test the printer completed a five-page document in one minute eleven seconds, hardly the 21 pages per minute of HP's headline figure, and even a bit slower than the 7.7ppm quoted for normal black text print.

A seven by five inch photo print at best quality on HP glossy photo paper came through in two minutes seventeen seconds, which is reasonable. The reproduction of the colour image using the default four-colour print system is fair, though it lacks a little vitality compared with the on-screen picture. The optional three-colour, photo cartridge wasn't supplied for review.

Print costs, based on HP's pricing and usage figures for the two cartridges, give a five percent black text page at 4.2p and a 20 percent colour one at 11.7p, though if you're printing photos the cost of a sheet of photo paper will bump that up to around 60p.

For a touch over £150, this is a very versatile, duplexing inkjet printer. It's particularly handy if you run a home network and even more so if you also have a notebook with a wireless adapter. The DeskJet 5850 produces clear text and very serviceable photo prints. It's excellent value.