HP Photosmart 8450

HP's flagship Photosmart 8450 takes the company's eight-ink system and combines it with the fantastic ease of use seen in some of its lower-end dedicated photo printers.

Features abound, such as the memory card slots which accept all the major formats; cards inserted here will also appear on your Desktop when plugged into a PC. Photos can be viewed, selected, manipulated and printed using the 2.5in colour screen and top-mounted buttons. Their use is generally intuitive; we were up and running in no time without even glancing at the manual.

A superb level of control over your photos is provided through the printer itself, with the ability to crop, apply effects and borders, and even remove red-eye from photos without going near your PC. Photos can be printed 1, 2, 3, 4 or 9 to a page, and a separate integral tray is provided for 6 x 4in paper. Individual frames from video clips can also be printed.

Standalone printing couldn't be easier. Contact sheets appear with empty bubbles beneath each picture. Tell the printer which you want to print by colouring in the bubble under each photo, select number of copies and format (including borderless and with white borders), and feed the contact sheet back through the printer. It will then automatically sense the media type inserted and start printing.

There are slots for three separate cartridges. The unit is supplied with a tri-colour, photo (providing light cyan, light magenta and photo black) and grey cartridge, the latter supplying light and dark grey as well as another reservoir of photo black. A high-capacity black cartridge is also available, and this can be swapped into the grey cartridge's slot. While this reduces the colour gamut, it skews the Photosmart 8450's focus towards text printing.

This not only renders the printer more versatile, but makes sense considering the Ethernet port included on the back. Setting up network printing was as easy as configuring a direct USB connection, and if you work in a mixed environment it's reassuring to know that Macs are supported too. All driver functions, such as checking ink levels, are available over the network, and when the relatively low costs per page and the availability of additional duplex and 250-sheet trays are considered, this printer makes surprisingly good sense for the small or home office. You can even buy a £26 Bluetooth dongle to allow you to print snaps from your camera phone.

While we can't fault this printer on features, its overall print quality falls short of stunning. Monochrome photos are sumptuous, with excellent detail and a pleasing depth, but plain text printing, even with the black cartridge installed, lacks HP's usual crispness. High-resolution photos display a smooth range of colours and a good degree of colour neutrality, but detail was coarse on some test shots; Canon's Bubble Jet i990 produced noticeably better prints when compared side-by-side, even on HP media. These problems largely disappeared when printing on satin-matt paper, but were apparent on gloss.

Print speeds were rather average, though not painfully slow, with 6 x 4in photos taking a little over two minutes to appear, and office documents running through at 4.4/19 pages per minute at default/draft settings respectively.

But, if you're after a high-quality and versatile unit with fantastic ease of use, the 8450 is a compelling choice.

Author: Christopher Phin