A good printer, but with a few quirks unique to HP.
Pros:
Excellent prints and photos. Simultaneous Wi-Fi and Bluetooth capability. Good small-office or home printer.
Cons:
Costly ink. Non-refillable cartridges. Not good for a lot of fax, scan, or copy work.
The Bottom Line:
Good printer. Expensive ink. Non-refillable cartridges. Good for infrequent fax, scan, copy work. Good photo quality. Poor recent HP product reliability prevents me from recommending it.
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Overall Rating:
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Author's Review
Overall, this is a solid printer that does what it is supposed to do - print reasonably good photos and excellent business graphics. As others have mentioned, the printer uses HP cartridges that contain a computer chip to sense when the cartridge is out of ink. The cartridges can be refilled, but the printer will still detect that a refilled cartridge is out of ink - and you do not EVER want to let a cartridge run dry. This places a greater burden on those who want to refill, as the user must keep track of ink usage, which is hard to do. Since the ink serves to cool the print heads, if a cartridge runs dry it can burn up a print nozzle which means you scrap the printer. You can buy aftermarket cartridges that are refillable and have a reset capability. That is the only way that I know of to circumvent the problem.
Print quality is excellent and the paper handling works well. Photos are good to excellent - at least in the 4x6 size. I haven't tried to print anything larger, but besides the ink expense, I expect the same results. This printer does not have a document feeder. It does use a lot of ink and replacement cartridges are quite expensive. The ink appears to be water-based, so it will run if your documents or photos get wet. Also, photos tend to fade over time, especially if exposed to the sun (as in leaving them on the seat of the car). In all fairness, most printed photos will fade in sunlight.
The printer supports direct insertion of memory cards from a digital camera. It will display the photos on the LCD screen and the user can select which ones to print. A very nice and convenient feature if you do not want to store the photos on a PC before printing.
The printer menu is very easy to understand. The printer features both Bluetooth and Wi-Fi capability, which makes it ideal for sharing by multiple machines across a network. I use it on 5 PCs on my home LAN and also use the Bluetooth capability at the same time when I use VPN on one of my machines (VPN makes that PC invisible to the local network). The Wi-Fi feature includes basic WEP encryption but does not support WPA.
The Fax, Scan, and Copy capabilities work well, but since the printer does not have a document feature, feeding pages manually can become a bit tiresome. It is good for users who copy and fax infrequently. If you use these features a lot, you will probably want to opt for a printer with a document feeder.
If you do not print photos, you may well be satisfied by an Officejet instead of a Photosmart as they share the same basic features.
I have experienced poor reliability with HP printers over the past 5 years or so. Older HP models seemed to last forever, but I personally do not expect to get more than 2 years out of the newer models based on my experience with my last five Photosmart and Officejet series printers.
