Labs

HP's Photosmart Pro B8850 is a professional-quality A3 photo and fine art printer, and is priced accordingly. It takes a while to set up. After loading eight ink cartridges and four print heads, you must wait 40 minutes as the printer fills its ink reservoirs and calibrates itself.

It takes eight ink cartridges, including matt and photographic black and light shades of grey, magenta and cyan. The cartridges are expensive, as are the print costs, with a mixed-colour A4 document costing 10.7p, which is comfortably the highest in the group.

The light-grey ink cartridge gave outstanding results in black-and-white photos and accurate grey tones in colour photos. If you select the greyscale-only option, the

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printer uses the light-grey cartridge instead of combining colours to produce grey. Photos were beautifully coloured. The B8850 uses pigmented inks, but it doesn't have a gloss cartridge. Colour photo prints were vivid, with more intense colours than those made by the R1900. Photos were less glossy, but the level of detail was outstanding.

The B8850 is not designed for plain document printing. Normal-quality mono text on 80gsm A4 looked blurry, although thinner draft-quality lettering was legible. Although its mixed-colour document costs are high, the B8850 is economical to use for its intended purpose. A 6x4in print cost 25.4p and an A3 print costs about £1.37.

This is an excellent printer, but we had problems with our review sample. The sheet feed failed to work correctly. It loaded paper but didn't register its presence once loaded. We couldn't test the printer's performance on canvas and fine art papers. This problem has been reported online by other users. HP states that it may be due to damage sustained in transit and should replace faulty units.

The B8850 produced the finest level of detail of any printer here and had gorgeous colour. The addition of grey ink makes it ideal for black-and-white prints. Our only reservation are the technical problems we encountered.