Product Reviews

HP recently replaced the Photosmart 8250 photo inkjet with two new models. We reviewed the Photosmart D7360 in What's New, Shopper December 2006, which at £194 didn't seem especially good value. Though it's now available for £150, we were interested to see if the more affordable D7160 was a better buy.

The D7160 is remarkably similar to the D7360. Both printers have an A4 paper tray that slides out, making it easy to load. There's a second tray for 6x4" photo paper, motorised so it engages automatically when you print 6x4" photos. Unlike most HP printers, the D7160 and D7360 use six individual ink tanks, which don't include print heads. They fit into a front compartment and supply ink to the permanent heads via capillary tubes.

The D7160 doesn't have the large touch screen fitted to the D7360, but it has a good-sized colour LCD. It uses this to preview the contents of any memory cards inserted into its range of slots. It's easy to choose the photos, layout and quantity you want to print, but you have to dig deeper

At the highest quality setting, the D7160 printed six borderless 6x4" photos from an SD card in two minutes and 38 seconds, which is extremely quick for an inkjet. We weren't entirely happy with the results, however, which seemed grainy. We repeated the test after manually setting the paper type to HP Premium Photo paper. The six shots looked much better, but took 10 minutes and 50 seconds to appear.

The D7160 is a photo-oriented printer, but it's easy to connect it to a PC and use it for regular prints. HP's simple setup program lets you choose the components you want to install. The D7160 is fast at printing on plain paper and produces high-quality prints. Text was printed with tidy outlines, even at the Fast Draft quality setting, which was quick. At the Fast Normal setting, text was suitable for formal correspondence and colour graphics were free of banding. The printer was very fast to print our colour Normal speed test.

You can find replacement colour ink cartridges for this printer online for as little as £5.58. They're available in one capacity, whereas black ink comes in standard and high yield; the latter is available for less than £16. This gives the D7160 reasonable running costs, but if you print lots of photos you can pick up a bundle of ink and 150 sheets of 6x4" photo paper, which lets you print photos for only 12.3p each.

The D7160 has a smaller screen than the D7360, but it produces near-identical results. It's just as affordable to run, but costs £50 less. It's a good photo printer that excels on plain paper.