Printer-hunting the consumer will be satisfied by new push HP's for simplicity: The company has a $ 150 printer / scanner / copier only synchronize the Photosmart Plus, under the Photosmart Premium ($ 200), positioned with no model number or alphanumeric nickname as 2459W or complicate THX1138 introduced to either name. Once they get it home and install the software, the buyers will find the multi-function inkjet printers have a number after all (B209), and we can not help you, ask what HP is doing in six months if there other models complements the product line (Photosmart Plus Plus? Almost Photosmart Premium?). But we welcome the concept of buying product names clearer and simpler. Of course everything is relative. Someone who will outfit a small office this could be a printer Photosmart Minus call for what they do not have - a fax, automatic document feeder for multipage copying or scanning, duplex printing. But we believe the plus earned its place among the affordable three-in-One with a good performance, print quality and especially user-friendly, thanks to the dual paper trays - for a letter-size and has a devoted to 5 of 7 inches or smaller Photo paper - and a 2.4-inch color LCD touch screen that the usual front-controls and switches replaced.
The screen display shows the most important symbols of the three main functions Photosmart, Photo, copy and scan. Pressing an arrow icon on one side provides a submenu of Quick Forms - low expression of graph paper, as well as stationery and calendars, checklists and Sudoku puzzles and mazes for - and setup to check ink level, and Wireless status screens .
No PC is needed for most of the features of the HP for viewing and printing photos on a USB flash drive or a digital camera flash card (front-mounted slots needed space for SD, MMC, MS and xD cards). The LCD is used to preview and select images and converting simple edits such as cropping and adjusting brightness, as well as more home project for options such as adding a decorative frame or sepia, or arrange for photos and album pages and print wallet or passport.
The development of the LCD raised translated in the number of black or color a picture or a page on the 1,200-dpi scanner glass, along with copier settings, such as size, quality, contrast, and improvements for text, photos, or both . Ditto for scanning a paper document or image on a memory card or USB drive.
Decisions for the scan to your PC include saving a photo in a file and adds them to an e-mail, creating a PDF file, making a PDF e-mail attachment and save a document as a TIFF image. Unlike most office-oriented all-in-one that comes Photosmart without optical character recognition (OCR) or document management software, and the touch-screen method works only for the creation of a PDF - Scanning multiple pages into a PDF document is a job provided HP Solution Center software, let alone to raise and close the scanner lid and outsourcing in the absence of ADF.
High-Quality Hard Copy
The touch screen replaces all the buttons and switches except the power button, the Photosmart Plus is a very clean and elegant appearance - a black box measuring approximately 18 by 16 by 8 cm and weighing a solid 16 pounds. The 125-sheet input tray and main 20-sheet photo tray are stacked in front, with printed pages, leaving the tip of the latter.
Wi-Fi (802.11b / g) printing and scanning is standard, as is a USB 2.0 interface - there's even a USB cable in the box shortly, what with a simple wireless setup, we encountered used. The business card-sized holder of cyan, magenta, yellow and black ink cartridges snap easily into place, too.
The standard HP 564 cartridges are rated at 300 pages, yellow, cyan, and magenta ($ 10 per person) and 250 pages for black ($ 12). If the originals run out, they want to be thrifty users with higher capacity ink tanks 564XL, 800 pages for black ($ 35 rated) and) 750 for the color ($ 18 apiece. The shares at 4.4 cents per black and 11.6 cents per color page highlights the position of the Photosmart as a graphic and less everyday printer - it's cheaper than many inkjet printers for color pages, but relatively expensive for black and white.
If you print mostly black text, you can be in a hurry by the printer design mode - it gives a little pale, dot-patterned graphics, but pretty good, dark enough text, taking only 47 seconds for a 10 - page Word document and 13 seconds for a one-sided business letter with spot-color company logo.
Stepping up to normal mode easily print the letter to 16 seconds and the 10-pager to 65, and took just under eight minutes for a 55-page Adobe Acrobat PDF document slowed. A copy of Standard for Walk-up, normal mode also supplied five copies of a black page in 46 seconds and five color copies of a magazine cover in 1 minute and 50 seconds.
Normal mode delivers sharp text and beautiful color illustrations and headlines stung, and saw also surprisingly good for photos (4 by 6-inch prints, on average, exactly one minute), but showed some banding in dark-colored surfaces. To eliminate the latter and to bring a little more detail and less grain in photos, you can opt for best quality mode, in which about half again took so long to our stopwatch tests.