HP Photosmart 8250 Ink Review

There's a good deal that's innovative in HP's Photosmart 8250, just about all compiled under the umbrella title of Scaleable Printing Technology (SPT). This is actually a significant break from custom for HP, at any rate for the home and SME printers, while the 8250 employs six distinct ink cartridges, that aren't built in to a changeable print head.

HP has developed a sole, huge (in printing terms) head to enable it to print extremely swiftly, over a wide swathe of the paper. Coupled with SPT are Vivera inks, a fresh formulation which HP states offers over 80 years fade resistance as well as virtually instant drying.

The Photosmart 8250 has pleasingly very simple lines, minus the plethora of buttons and lights seen upon several of its competitors. A button wheel for menu navigation plus a large blue indicator to illustrate printing augments a single strip of buttons. At the extreme right there's a memory card reader below a hinged cover, supporting CompactFlash, SD/MMC, MemoryStick and also xD, but not SmartMedia - those with older cameras be warned.

In classic HP form, paper feeds via a tray in front that can store close to 100 sheets and ejects on top of the actual tray. On the 8250, though, you will find there's discrete tray for the purpose of 6 x 4-inch photo blanks, that may be packed at the same time as the A4 one. The unit drags the photo tray in any time you specify 6 x 4 prints and consequently ejects it again at the close of the task.

The SPT system ties the brand new silicon head to six, individual ink tanks which are all fitted handily in a line beneath the hinged top cover of the printer. The rest of the installation is the usual practice: install the software; connect a USB 2.0 cable and print.

HP promises extraordinary print rates of speed for this particular model, just 14 seconds for a 6 x 4-inch print. The great news is that we produced one in nine seconds, however this is tempered by the fact that it was only in rapid, draft mode on A4 plain paper. When you change to glossy paper or to 6 x 4-inch print blanks, the pace falls significantly, although we actually saw our test 5 x 3 print at best quality finish in 1 minute 18 seconds, and that is decent.

Print quality using the HP Photosmart 8250 printer cartridges is nicely up to HP's normal criteria, having lustrous, black print combined with little or no perceptible fringing. Colour graphics printed consistently without any apparent banding, although saturation wasn't comprehensive in blocks of lighter colours. Six-colour picture prints were extremely sharp, with lots of detail in more dark areas and even colour flows in skies from mid-haven to horizon. Colour processing was fairly accurate, even without having any colour matching.

It's not easy to discover where the benefits of SPT lie for the purchaser. Whilst you can certainly get a lot of pages from a solitary black cartridge, neither black or colour prints are a lot cheaper than from previous HP designs. The much talked about, 14 second print is a little bit of a gimmick, as it is limited to A4 printing exclusively, and it is countered elsewhere by the printer being forced to temporarily halt for maintenance, through longer print jobs. Nevertheless, it's a proficient photo printer, which also deals with plain paper documents well.

HP Photosmart 8250 printer ink cartridges are available here.