HP Photosmart D7460 in Printers

Some of this month's inkjets are office printers that can also do photographs. The Photosmart is avowedly a photo printer, but one that'll print documents as well.

This is evident not just in the Photosmart name, but the features too. There's PictBridge, but it's joined by a multi-card reader, for grabbing images directly from a camera's memory card. There's optional Bluetooth, so you can beam pictures over from a mobile phone. It's all topped off by a 3.5in touchscreen, for browsing pictures and performing basic editing tasks including cropping and red-eye reduction.

With accoutrements like this, you'd expect the D7460 to be a top-flight photo printer. And it's certainly this month's quickest: it turned out our 6 x 4in photo in just 26 seconds, and managed our full A4 photomontage in under a minute - almost twice as fast as the Canon Pixma iP4500.

But speed isn't everything. From a distance prints looked as good as any in this month's Labs, but moving slightly closer brought coarse dithering into plain view; skies that every other printer rendered as smooth blue came out blotchy - fine for hanging on the wall, but unacceptable for individual prints.

The Photosmart made a better fist of document printing. Draft-mode text was clear and perfectly readable despite a large number of slightly deformed letters. Switching to standard mode made things more regular and crisp: our only real criticism is that blacks had a blue-grey cast and lacked solidity.

Here, however, speed was not a strength. In our standard-quality test the Photosmart came just a whisker ahead of the last-placed Epson. It did better in our draft-quality and colour tests, coming third out of six, but this was still a disappointment from a printer costing this much.

And it's not just the printer that's expensive. Like the Epson, the Photosmart D7460 takes six ink cartridges; but unlike the Epson these cost nearly £10 each, and by the time we'd printed 166 photos, four of them needed replacing. The eventual cost worked out to 32p per photo - the highest of any of this month's inkjets.

The Photosmart D7460 is clearly aimed at amateur digital photographers, who may appreciate its speed and convenience. But you'll get better picture quality elsewhere for less.

Author: David Bayon