HP Photosmart B8550 Cartridge Review

HP's on a roll with its high-end photo printers-the types built to print at anywhere up to supertabloid size (13 by 19 inches). The HP Photosmart B8550 Photo Printer is yet another notable device and is directed at high-end customers.

The B8550 employs dye-based inks and rather than being built to print on a selection of fine art papers, it is really basically limited to employing HP's superior photo paper. Inside of those limitations, however, it prints gorgeous output at big size.

The B8550 at the same time contains some consumer-oriented features such as the capability to print straight from a USB key, memory card, or PictBridge camera, and also an LCD to let you preview pictures prior to printing. Still another significant difference is that even though there's little reason to obtain the B8550 if you don't wish to use it for the purpose of pictures, you can easily employ it as a standard home printer also.

The B8550's principal paper tray holds 40 sheets of photo paper or alternatively 125 sheets of plain paper, and that is a satisfactory quantity for the purpose of a home model. Furthermore, a different photo tray holds up to 20 sheets of photo paper, however it's restricted to a maximum paper size of 5 by 7 inches.
Setting up the B8550 is simple. It's a bit bigger than the majority of inkjets, at 7.1 by 22.8 by 15.3 inches (HWD), but it weighs just 16.7 pounds. Just look for a position for it, remove the packaging materials, link the power cord, and snap in the five ink cartridges (which include both a matte black along with a photo black). After that run the automated installation program and then hook up by USB cable when the program informs you to. I examined the unit with Windows XP, but it simultaneously includes drivers intended for Vista and Mac OS 10.4 and later.

The B8550 is among the quicker tabloid-size inkjets I've analyzed. The overall time on our business applications suite was 13 minutes 32 seconds. The B8550 also scored well on our photo suite, averaging 1:33 for each 4-by-6 and 2:31 for each 8-by-10. The times for supertabloid photos ranged from 5:43 to 6:55 per photograph.

As I've already indicated, the photo quality when using the HP Photosmart B8550 printer ink cartridges is superb. The solitary exception was a grayscale photo, that demonstrated slight tints, with different colour tints at diverse shades of grey.

Graphics quality was very much in the same league. I saw a bit of visible dithering in the form of minor graininess in some output, however nothing I'd personally call objectionable. Colours were definitely eye-catching and also completely saturated, not to mention the printer actually did a good job with thin lines, which most models have difficulties with.

Text output-not this specific printer's primary purpose-on plain paper ended up being at the poor end of what I hope to find from an inkjet. More than half of the fonts in our text assessments registered as readily legible at 8 points. Under half registered as adequately produced at 8 points, due to a character spacing factor. That said, although it drops a little short of exactly what you'd probably wish for fully professional quality output, it's easily sufficiently good for the purpose of schoolwork and most business use.

The fairly poor text quality might seem to take a bit of the shine away from the B8550, however do not forget that it is made as a near-dedicated picture model. It actually installs with default driver configurations for printing pictures upon photo paper. In this particular context, having the ability to work as a regular printer, and even print text documents in any respect, is a bonus. The fact remains that the combination of photo quality, speed, as well as large-format printing makes the B8550 an exceptional picture model for the cost.

HP Photosmart B8550 printer ink cartridges are available here.