9 out of 9 people found this review helpful.
Fast, built-in wireless, dedicated 4x6 photo tray, BUY IT!
Date of Review: Aug 1, 2008
The Bottom Line: Lost a star only because it won't handle thicker paper. Otherwise it's flawless! Buy it!
The more I use HP printers, the more loyal I become. I've always viewed printers as somewhat disposable, because you can buy a basic printer with starter inks for about the same price as genuine HP replacement inks. But I managed to get 4 years of use from my existing deskjet and I only looked to replace it when I wanted to add a printer to my wireless home network. I was apalled at the price for an adapter for my existing deskjet printer! I found this Photosmart D7460 as a demo model. It didn't have a price on it, so I had plenty of time to study its features while the salesperson looked up the price.
I was thrilled to see it had a built-in 802.11g, plus internet capabilities, plus a really cool touch-screen control panel. It also has a robust computer interface that tells you your ink levels, how many prints you've made since the last ink change, hooks you with the HP store to reorder ink and much more.
The printer has slots for every type of digital media (photos) and a dedicated 4x6 photo paper tray. That means you can always have photo paper in it, and still print 8.5 x 11 regular paper! I wouldn't have looked for a feature like that but I find myself printing far more photos than ever before, which is nice. I used to put my photos on my computer and only print when I felt like lugging out my photo paper and doing the switch-aroo.
The printer uses the 6-color Vivera ink system which run about $10 each. 2 of those 6 colors are used to make photos more vibrant, and I don't think they're used for normal printing. The color cartridges seem small but do last quite a while. The black cartridge is quite a bit bigger.
Unfortunately, if one of the 5 colors runs out, it doesn't print with the remaining 4 -- it brings up an error message on the printer itself and you have to either cancel printing or print in black only. Kind of defeats the benefits of wireless when you have to walk to the computer to press OK to printing in black only. But I got smart and set my printing preferences to black-only until I got the replacement cartridge.
The software it comes with doesn't like it when you turn off the printer but luckily it has a sleep function, and it is Energy Star, so hopefully it's not pulling much power from being on 24/7. (If you turn off the printer you'll get periodic error messages on your computer.)
Also, something about the installation consumes about 160meg of space on my hard drive. As soon as I figure out if I can safely remove it, I will.
And last, the only shortcoming I've seen so far is that a high-quality photo paper I purchased won't feed into the printer. I keep getting an "empty paper" error. There's no thickness adjustment or manual feed option.
But in summary, having the built-in wireless capability alone makes this printer a winner. Add to that the incredible speed -- even for high-density photos -- and the tremendous quality of the images and you've got yourself a MUST-BUY. I would rate this 4 out of 5 stars.
