Product Reviews

This A3+ inkjet is aimed at professional and keen-amateur photographers, and is available in two models. The gp variant reviewed here costs around £70 more than the standard printer, and comes bundled with a monitor calibration device. Using this to make a colour profile for your system's display helps ensure that printed colours and brightness levels match those that you see onscreen.

Unusually for this class of printer, the Photosmart prints directly from memory cards. There's no preview screen, though, so you have to make index sheets to select a specific photo or range of prints. Selecting shots from an SD card containing more than 200 pictures involved printing four A4 sheets in our test.

The Photosmart prints with nine inks in three cartridges. The standard HP tri-colour cartridge contains cyan, magenta and

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yellow inks, and a blue photo cartridge adds blue, light cyan and light magenta. A third cartridge that contains black and two shades of grey helps the 8750 to produce neutral greyscale prints.

All three cartridges have a five-picolitre minimum droplet size, which is rather large compared to competitors such as Canon's iP9950 (reviewed in What's New, Shopper November 2004) or Epson's Stylus Photo R1800 (see What's New, Shopper July 2005). The Photosmart's prints seemed fine in isolation, but they were quickly shown up when compared with samples from the others.

Prints don't seem especially grainy, but they suffer from a softness and comparative lack of contrast. Detail in dark areas was poor, particularly when compared to the Epson's prints. We weren't satisfied with the finish quality on HP's high-gloss Premium Plus paper, and using third-party media reduced the intensity of black and dark colours.

Photos from the 8750 take a couple of hours to dry fully, during which time dark colours lighten and the finish becomes smoother. This makes it hard to proof a large image by printing a smaller sample first, as you have to wait for it to dry.

Long print times are likely to slow you down further. At its highest print quality, the Photosmart took 22 minutes to print a borderless A3+ image. Epson's R1800 took just 12 minutes, and is a far better choice for those serious about photography.