HP's OfficeJet Pro range is designed for the small and home office environment and has a higher duty cycle than its lower-priced OfficeJet siblings. The L7590 is at the high end of the OfficeJet Pro range and includes a 50-sheet Auto Document Feeder (ADF) and a duplexer as standard. The biggest difference, though, is in its ink and print system, which is very different from the OfficeJet range.

Behind a cover on the left-hand side of the paper tray are holders for four separate ink cartridges, the standard CMYK mix, which are connected to the twin print heads via small bore, transparent tubes. Each head prints two colours, yellow paired with black and cyan with magenta. The high-capacity ink system means less frequent maintenance and faster print, but also results in quite a lot of extra pumping noises. There's a 20-minute charging cycle when you plug in your first ink cartridges, too.

The main paper tray can hold 250 sheets and the paper makes a full 180-degree turn before exiting onto its top cover. There's no separate photo tray, as there often is with cheaper Photosmart all-in-ones, and it takes a bit of delving inside the machine to load 15 x 10cm photo blanks; it's not really a priority in an office printer.

This fact is brought home to you by the lack of a colour LCD display for previewing photos. A bit surprising, then, that there are four memory card slots set into the right-hand end of the front panel, for all the major card types. There's no doubt that it wants to be a fax machine, however, as there's a numeric pad and speed-dial buttons for your most common recipients.

Print speeds are rated at 35ppm for black and 34ppm for colour, both in draft mode. Under test, we saw 10ppm and 11ppm respectively, and when switched to normal print mode the machine managed only 8ppm and 6ppm. Duplex printing suffers from a pause of over 10 seconds for ink drying, between the printing of the first and second sides of a page, giving a speed of under 1spm. All printing is pretty noisy, with measured peak levels of 68dBA, mainly due to the paper feed mechanism.

Print quality is generally good, with near-laser quality black print showing little ink spatter, except over coloured backgrounds where there's some slight bleed. Copy quality from the ADF and the flatbed is good, with black text in particular very close to original quality.

Ink costs are comparatively low, with a cost of under 2p per black ISO page and under 4.5p for colour. You should only need to maintain the machine on roughly the same frequency as a low-end colour laser.

HP has produced an interesting all-in-one printer with the OfficeJet Pro L7590, as it overlaps with the typical use and costs of a budget colour laser printer. Text and graphics print quality is not quite up to the clarity of a laser-based printer, but photos come out rather better because of the larger colour gamut of liquid inks. It's a shame it takes so long to print duplex pages, though.