The HP PSC-2355 looks like the baby brother of the Photosmart 2610, but HP tucks it away in a separate part of its Home and Home Office Web site. PSC stands for Printer / Scanner / Copier, which is another way of saying that the PSC-2355 doesn't include a fax or network port, and that immediately reduces its appeal for the office.

Although HP separates the Photosmart and PSC models, we found that both ranges are superb photo printers, and the PSC-2355 does have an LCD display, but it is a smaller 4.5cm (one and three quarter inch) unit than the 6.4cm/2.5-inch item used in the Photosmart 2610. Once again HP offers a choice of ink cartridges to bump up the array of colours that you can use when printing photos.

To our mind this is a photo printer, from the SD, MMC, xD, Memory Stick and Compact Flash slots, through the LCD display, and on to the optional photo ink cartridge. Printing photos is a slow process, but the results are impressive. Colours are precise and accurate, and if you see an error on the print then you can bet that it is present on the original image.

We were surprised to see that the HP PSC-2355 compared poorly with the Photosmart 2610 when it came to regular text printing. Every Hewlett Packard printer that we have seen in living memory prints superb black text, but this model wasn't so hot. However we are prepared to go out on a limb to suggest that we were simply unfortunate with our review model.

One unusual feature that definitely isn't a mistake is the fact that there is no paper output tray so the paper enters the HP from the front and is then dropped back out on top of the input tray.

Although HP includes its usual enormous 771MB of software including HP Image Zone, HP Instant Share and HP Director, we found it quite tricky to persuade the PSC-2355 to work at the settings that we chose. It was simple to operate at a default scanning resolution of 200dpi but it really didn't want to change to our preferred 300dpi setting, and we find that hard to swallow.

Similarly the drivers didn't want to believe us when we told it what size of paper we were printing photos on and instead wanted to auto-detect the paper type and size. We are very happy when technology makes our life easier, but we at least like to feel that we are in control of the situation.