Although we are amazed by the low price point of many MFDs, the HP Photosmart 2610 All-in-One shows what a manufacturer can do when it pushes the price up towards £200. The most obvious feature is the 6.4cm LCD display, which is two and a half inches in old money.

Generally speaking a display on a printer is of most interest to people who are carrying out direct printing from a digital camera but HP goes further than that as it uses the display to help you set up the Photosmart 2610 All-in-One.

In particular it means that you don't have to rely on the printer drivers to tell you what's going on, so when you first turn the HP on and install the two ink cartridges the Photosmart 2610 uses the LCD and confirms that the cartridges are genuine HP and then it automatically prints an alignment page. This process is so simple that it makes the Epson CX6600 look very poor in contrast.

Each time that you change a cartridge in the Photosmart 2610 the screen tells you what you have just done, making it clear that the cartridges are chipped to identify them. HP puts a great emphasis on the supply of consumables, so it supplies them in regular and high yield sizes, and in addition you can get a photo cartridge and a photo grey cartridge.

Although we found the conventional No. 348 photo cartridge gave slightly more accurate colours than the regular No. 343 tri-colour cartridge the difference was far more slender than we expected, and we were unable to see any benefit with the grey cartridge installed.

At all times in our testing we were deeply impressed by the print quality of this MFD, and the speed of text printing was simply breathtaking, but oddly that wasn't the most impressive feature of the Photosmart 2610. For that you need to turn to the huge 771MB HP software suite which is superbly integrated with Windows and the Office 2000 and Photoshop 7 applications that we had installed on our test PC.

For instance, when you press the Scan button a screen pops up asking whether you wish to scan to Image Director, the Image Viewer, to Word, or wherever. When you insert a camera memory card the HP Image Transfer Software starts automatically allowing you to preview the images on the LCD display.

Despite the relatively high price the Photosmart 2610 is excellent value for money.