HP Deskjet 2540

The HP Deskjet 2540 is an low-cost all-in-one printer with built-in wireless networking and a 1,200×1,200dpi scanner, but few other features. There’s only a tiny mono LCD display and no memory card reader. This means direct printing and scanning aren’t an option, and the MFP doesn’t support HP’s ePrint email printing system. You can print directly from Android and iOS tablets and phones, though, and it’s unquestionably cheap – we originally reviewed it at its £40 RRP but prices have now dropped as low as £30 from some retailers.

The Deskjet 2540 looks and feels distinctly flimsy, and its design harks back to HP’s original Deskjet range, but this is a modern and surprisingly capable MFP for the price. It takes just two ink cartridges: a dye-based tri-colour cartridge for photos and colour document prints, and a pigment black ink cartridge designed to produce pin-sharp lettering. Unfortunately, this makes for very expensive running costs, even if you buy HP’s XL ink cartridges. A mono page comes it at 4p, but we were surprised by a relatively low colour cost of 5.8p, which adds up to a total of 9.8p per page of mixed black and colour printing.

HP Deskjet 2540 Print Quality

Standard quality mono text is among the best we’ve seen from a budget MFP, which is a credit to the quality of HP’s pigmented ink, which doesn’t bleed. There were very few jagged or uneven letter edges when we looked at our document’s 12pt text closely, although there was still a very faintly fuzzy edge to the letters on 75gsm paper. As ever, we recommend using 100gsm paper for optimal inkjet print quality. Draft quality text was almost identical to our standard quality prints, just a little thinner. As there’s little qualitative difference, there are distinct advantages to printing in draft mode: while our standard quality mono letter printed at 7.9ppm, our draft document emerged at 11.7ppm, saving over a minute on a 25-page print.

Both speeds are rather slow for even an inkjet, and the Deskjet 2540’s performance in our colour print speed test produced a print speed of just 1.6ppm. Fortunately, after waiting a quarter of an hour for our prints, there was little to complain about in terms of quality. Our colourful charts were smoothly shaded, even 8pt text was clear, dense and solid. Of all the sub-£50 MFPs we’ve seen recently, this definitely produces some of the best colour prints, making them well worth the wait.

Deskjets are all about document printing, but we were nonetheless disappointed by the 2540’s inability to make borderless photo prints. Unless you’re handy with a pair of scissors, this rules it out for photo printing. Our 6x4in photo prints on appropriately sized paper came out at around 5x3in, with a thick white border on one side and thinner borders on the others. They were slow to print, too, at 20 minutes and 39 seconds, while two 10x8in prints also took around 20 minutes.

Despite these issues, the quality of our photo prints wasn’t too bad. Even the washed-out looking reproduction of dark areas wasn’t too bad once the ink had dried properly over a period of about 36 hours. Colours are bright, but not too unnatural and although some low-contrast images look a little murky and the gradation of delicate shading can be a little abrupt in places. We’d have had no major complaints if only we could be print borderless images. That said, this isn’t sold as a photo printer, so you’re not being promised anything that it doesn’t deliver.