HP Photosmart 5520 review – not the photo printer you’re looking for

The HP Photosmart 5530 is a neat-looking and relatively low-cost option for photo printing, but as we discovered, low prices and high-quality prints don’t exactly go hand in hand. It has just four ink colours, and although it’s one of HP’s cheaper printers, there are individual cartridges for each. These slot into the print head, which has integrated print nozzles.

The combination of individual tanks and a print head that’s built into the printer rather than the ink cartridges means that you don’t have to worry about replacing ink unnecessarily simply because one colour has run out or the nozzles have clogged. If the nozzles on the printer do block up, you can run cleaning cycles or, in extreme cases, get a replacement print head.

With the ink installed and the printer switched on, you’re ready to configure it using the integrated touchscreen display. On-screen instructions can take you through loading paper into the surprisingly flimsy tray at the bottom of the printer. The tray lacks a cover and there’s no output tray – printed pages are spat out just above the stack of fresh paper, with only a thin bit of plastic to prevent them from falling off onto the table.

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To our surprise, however, this worked reasonably well to keep our multi-page print jobs in order, at least up to the 20-sheet mark. Loading 6x4in paper requires you to push it a long way into the depths of the printer’s input tray with only the paper guides to go on, or you can pull the tray out completely to load it. It’s awkward and uncomfortable, but everything stayed properly aligned.

With both paper and ink in place, the printer will align its print heads for optimal quality. After the alignment page has been printed, all you need do it place it on the platen of the integrated scanner and the MFP will do the rest of the job itself. You can also configure its wireless connection, which is essential if you want to take advantage of HP’s ePrint features to send documents to the printer via email.

When you install the drivers, you’re given the option of either installing them from the disc or going online to get the latest version of the software. Annoyingly, the default software installation includes junk apps such as a Bing search bar for your browsers and software which feeds back information about how you use the product. The HP Photo Creations tool lets you use templates to turn photos into calendars and cards which you can either print or order online, but this is also of limited use. We recommend using the custom software selection option to deselect unwanted applications.

The driver has only a handful of basic settings, but if you want to configure even something as simple as borderless photo printing, you’ll have to open the Advanced tab in the paper/qualities screen. This is not very pretty to look at, but there are plenty of handy options, including a greyscale printing mode and a choice of profiles in the Colour Management pull-down. We’d have appreciated a clearer layout and more information about all the options presented.

We’re not fans of the overly simplistic scanner interface, either, although it’s not quite as irritating as some of HP’s previous attempts. The MFP has a maximum scan resolution of 1,200 x 2,400dpi. Our scans were accurately coloured but the driver applied excessive sharpening during the scanning process, which introduced distortion and artefacts to the image. We’ve seen this issue with other recent Photosmart MFPs. Scan speeds were rather slow, too – the Preview is actually a 150dpi scan which takes 23 seconds.

Beyond that, a 300dpi A4 scan took 38 seconds, a 600dpi 6x4in scan took 46 seconds and a 1,200dpi photo scan took a creaking two minutes and 37 seconds. If you’re planning on scanning troves of old family photo albums, it’s worth having a read of our guide. While it won’t help with the slow scanning speed of the Photosmart 5520 itself, having an efficient workflow should save you time elsewhere. Scanning multiple photos simultaneously will certainly help mitigate some of the slowness of the Photosmart 5520’s scanning process.

The Photosmart 5520 is more of a versatile all-rounder than a dedicated photo printer, although the entire Photosmart range is supposed to provide a more image-friendly alternative to HP’s business-like Officejet printers. Its plain paper document printing is excellent, with clear, sharp text on our mono letter and great-looking text and illustrations on our colour business document. Even draft text looked good enough for day-to-day use, with only slight jaggedness on some letters. Print speeds are a quick 13.4ppm for mono text, 3.8ppm for colour and 13.8ppm for draft.

Unfortunately, photo quality is genuinely poor, particularly on anything involving large areas of dark colour. A black sky was rendered as a washed-out greyish blue, while other dark prints lacked any sort of contrast, with all detail lost in a wash of grey. Red and yellow tones are pleasingly bright and the prints are sharp, but overall quality isn’t good enough for display purposes.

Print costs are low, at least, with a total cost of 9.1p per page of mixed black and colour document printing and 2.7p per mono page. Photos printed on HP’s Advanced Photo Paper also proved to be relatively inexpensive in total, with a 6x4in print costing 22.2p and an A4 print coming out at 85.3p. However, the ink makes up a surprising part of this cost – over 11p in the case of the 6x4in photo and around 47p for A4.

Because of its poor photo quality, we’ve only given the Photosmart 5520 thee stars, despite its other merits as a low-cost home MFP. It’s a decent all-rounder but a substandard photo printer. It’s also now over three years old and has been superseded by a whole range of faster, higher quality MFPs that cost the same yet produce significantly better results and pack in more features.

Unless you happen to find a Photosmart 5520 at an incredibly low price, anyone buying a printer in 2016 that is even considering occasionally printing photos should look instead to Canon’s excellent PIXMA MG5650. It admittedly has controls that take a while to get used to, but there’s no doubting its ability to produce beautiful photo prints. It’s also fast when it comes to regular printing, doesn’t cost the earth to refill, and thanks to recent price cuts should only set you back about £50 from Argos making it a considerably better choice.