Hewlett Packard may have lost its overall inkjet market lead to Epson, but it still builds very good printers. The DeskJet 970Cxi has stylishly curved lines that hide the same type of mechanism as in previous DeskJets, where the paper feeds from a tray projecting from the front of the machine, makes a 180-degree turn and ends up in a paper-out tray directly above where it started from.

A smoked plastic top lets you see the print carrier sweeping across the paper as it prints. There are two ink cartridges in the machine, each using an integral print head, so you change the head when you renew the ink. The black and tri-colour cartridges are easy to fit and you can obtain light and heavy use variants of the black cartridge to suit your own level of use.

The printer is equipped for parallel and USB connection and instructions for setting up both are provided on a useful poster-sized setup sheet. Controls on the front panel comprise power, resume and cancel. The cancel button is a good emergency facility, as it stops the current print job immediately and flushes the print buffer.

The DeskJet 970Cxi comes with a clip-on duplexing unit as standard. With the duplexer in place, you simply tell the software you want to print double-sided pages and the printer handles it. HP has employed a novel technique for duplexing, where the page is pulled back into the printer and rolled over, presenting the bottom edge of the second side for printing. The printer then prints the reverse side upside down, so it aligns with the first side - a clever bit of lateral thinking.

The printer driver - versions for Windows and Macintosh are provided - supports multi-page per sheet printing and various duplexing styles, but doesn't offer watermarks or overprints. You do have direct control over colour, ink volume and drying time, though, which is useful if you're using less absorbent papers.

Printing of a text and graphics test page wasn't that quick. This wasn't anything to do with the print mechanism itself, which is quick and intelligent enough to speed up for sections of a page which are all black text, slowing only for colour. Instead, the driver took a long time to rasterise the page ready for printing, much longer than Epson's did on the Stylus Color 980, for instance. The test page wasn't printed from an obscure application, either, but from Word 2000. The actual print quality, however, was very good indeed.

HP's DeskJet 970Cxi is a high-value printer, with built-in duplexing at a very modest price. Print quality is good, though print speed is variable due to the long time sometimes taken by the software rasteriser. The printer is easy to set up and use and very quiet in operation.