HP Photosmart 7550 Review

Just like fine wines, a number of printers improve with age. When the HP Photosmart 7550 hit the market out we gave it decent, although not stellar, marks. Although its output was good, we at first anticipated even more from a photo inkjet found at price. However, the Photosmart 7550 has endured the test of time all right, and its print quality with all of the types of output - pictures, text, and graphics - rivals even the latest generation of photo inkjets at comparable prices.

Outwardly, the 7550 manages to look both cute and also space age. It's made just like a brick house, but at 15.2 by 6.5 by 20.2 inches, this particular condensed model won't hog any desk area. The paper tray is nonretractable, however even that won't add many additional inches to the printer's waistline.

The CD contains drivers for Windows 98, 2000, Me, along with XP, in addition to Mac OS 9.x, X, and 10.1. Moreover, you get photo and imaging software for Windows. Although the 7550 completely supports the USB 2.0 interface, HP's package includes no USB cable.

This specific model brings a fascinating technique to ink cartridges. Whilst conventional ink printers make use of a CMYK cartridge structure, the 7550 comes with three specific cartridges: Black, Regular Colour, and Photo Colour. Notice that there are three print slots inside which you place the black and colour cartridges. The photo cartridge, which includes nozzles made for significantly finer firing, takes over when you wish to print high-resolution photos.

You'll need to employ the photo colour cartridge merely if you're printing a colour photograph, generally by way of the Print dialog box. Based upon ones printing habits, you may well be in a position to replace a bit of your ink not quite so frequently. For example, in the event you primarily print pictures, you'll most likely replenish the photo colour cartridge more often compared to others. Fewer cartridge changes result in less cash outflow, however the 7550 negates any kind of cost savings by using more ink than alot of printers.

Along with printing pictures from a Computer, the 7550 prints straight from camera media, such as CompactFlash Type I and II, SmartMedia, Secure Digital, Sony Memory Stick, and also MultiMedia cards. In addition, the 7550 incorporates an integrated 1-inch (diagonal) Lcd, and this enables you to preview, zoom, and crop images intended for printing without the need of accessing software on your pc.

In speed assessments, the 7550 created inkjet text at 3.83 pages per minute (ppm), clearly not as quick in comparison to the output of normal inkjets. Printing one 8x10-inch photograph took 5.3 minutes.

For a photo inkjet, however, middle-of-the-road speeds are generally less important than its output quality, and the 7550's output practically cancelled out the mediocre print rates of speed when compared with those of fellow photo printers. Although the 7550's photo was a bit dark, it appeared razor-sharp as well as precise. The colours especially skin tones, came out accurate, sleek, and nicely combined.

The 7550's text output using the HP Photosmart 7550 ink cartridges came out razor-sharp on both plain and also coated papers, although fine detail appeared to vanish at small font sizes. Plain-paper artwork appeared excellent on first look, but closer inspection exposed several pixelation problems. For instance, we could see the pixels utilized to make a metallic image. Luckily, the 7550's pixel issue is not obvious enough in order to cause alarm. Actually, when compared to the text and graphics output among photo printers which we have examined lately the HP's printouts look positively excellent.

On the downside, the HP Photosmart 7550 might end up costing you a wee bit more than equivalent printers, because of its vast ink consumption. The Photosmart 7550 is nevertheless a fantastic choice for grade-A photos and B+ text and graphics...if you are not in a big hurry.

HP Photosmart 7550 ink cartridges are to be found here.