Our third and final dedicated photo printer is priced within a couple of pounds of Canon’s Pixma iP4600 flagship, so it’s to be expected that it’ll boast similar chops in terms of performance and usability.

Certainly straight out of the box it impresses with a grey and white colour scheme that makes it a great match for some of Apple’s older consumer products like the iMac and Mac mini.

Feature-wise, it boasts some neat ones, including a small colour LCD to help with printer setup and trouble shooting, plus a PictBridge port and slots on the front for a wide range of flash memory cards. The combined input/output tray is a doozy too. There’s room here for both A4 and 10 x 15cm photo paper in the upper and lower compartments, plus HP has also been able to integrate a disc-printing tray – much more convenient than having to add one in separately.

Like the Deskjet 6940, it uses Vivera inks, although this time there are separate tanks for black, photo black, cyan, magenta and yellow, all easy to install and replace once you’ve dropped in the print head.

When it comes to printing mono documents, the Photosmart D5460 acquits itself well, with deep blacks and only the slightest hint of feathering at character edges. Black and white pages drop into the output tray in 18 seconds from when you hit print.

Colour A4 printing is suitably quick. Using the highest quality setting, our test print took just 3 minutes 30 seconds. The results are excellent too, with a great degree of colour accuracy and a complete absence of banding or other printing distortions.

However, while our prints passed the scratch test, they failed the water test, smudging when rubbed even when bone dry. You’d be wise to place your prints under glass or in an album as quickly as possible. HP says its Vivera inks have a shelf life of 105 years under glass using dedicated photo inks and paper.

The HP Photosmart D5460 has much to commend it – it’s quick and produces great-looking photo prints. Only slightly fuzzy mono prints and failure in our water test stops it getting top marks.