The present work introduces an efficient screening technique to take advantage of the fast spatial decay of the short range Hartree-Fock (HF) exchange used in the Heyd-Scuseria-Ernzerhof (HSE) screened Coulomb hybrid density functional. The screened HF exchange decay properties and screening efficiency are compared with traditional hybrid functional calculations on solids. The HSE functional is then assessed using 21 metallic, semiconducting, and insulating solids. The examined properties include lattice constants, bulk moduli, and band gaps. The results obtained with HSE exhibit significantly smaller errors than pure density functional theory (DFT) calculations. For structural properties, the errors produced by HSE are up to 50% smaller than the errors of the local density approximation, PBE, and TPSS functionals used for comparison. When predicting band gaps of semiconductors, we found smaller errors with HSE, resulting in a mean absolute error of 0.2 eV (1.3 eV error, for all pure DFT functionals). In addition, we present timing results which show the computational time requirements of HSE to be only a factor of 2-4 higher than pure DFT functionals. These results make HSE an attractive choice for calculations of all types of solids. (C) 2004 American,Institute of Physics..