HP Photosmart Plus Review

Printer-perusing consumers will be pleased by HP's new push for simplicity: The company has introduced a $150 printer/scanner/copier dubbed just the Photosmart Plus, positioned below the Photosmart Premium ($200), with no model number or alphanumeric moniker like 2459W or THX1138 to complicate either name. Once they get it home and install the software, buyers will find the multifunction inkjet does have a number after all (B209), and we can't help wondering what HP will do in six months when it adds more models to the product line (Photosmart Plus Plus? Photosmart Nearly Premium?). But we applaud the concept of clearer product names and easier shopping.

Of course, everything is relative. Someone looking to outfit a small office might call this printer a Photosmart Minus for what it doesn't have -- a fax; an automatic document feeder for multipage copying or scanning; duplex printing. But we think the Plus earns its place among affordable three-in-ones with good performance, print quality, and most of all ease of use, thanks to dual paper trays -- one for letter-size stock and one dedicated to 5 by 7-inch or smaller photo paper -- and a 2.4-inch color LCD touch screen that replaces the usual front-panel controls and buttons.

The screen's main display shows icons for the Photosmart's three main functions, Photo, Copy, and Scan. Pressing an arrow icon to one side brings a secondary menu of Quick Forms -- prefab printouts such as letter paper and graph paper, plus calendars, checklists, and sudoku and mazes for puzzlers -- and setup, ink-level check, and wireless status screens.

No PC is needed for most of the HP's functions for viewing and printing photos on a USB flash drive or a digital camera's flash card (front-mounted slots accommodate SD, MMC, MS, and xD cards). The LCD serves to preview and select images and to apply simple edits such as cropping and adjusting brightness, as well as more home-project options such as adding a decorative frame or sepia tint or arranging photos and printing album pages or wallet or passport photos.

Tapping the LCD also translates into specifying the number of black or color copies of a photo or page placed on the 1,200-dpi scanner glass, along with copier settings such as size, quality, contrast, and enhancements for text, photos, or both. Ditto for scanning a paper pic or document to a memory card or USB drive.

Choices for scanning to your PC include saving a photo as a file, attaching it to an e-mail, creating a PDF file, making a PDF e-mail attachment, and saving a document as a TIFF image. Unlike most office-oriented all-in-ones, the Photosmart comes with no optical character recognition (OCR) or document management software, and the touch-screen method works only for creating one-page PDFs -- scanning multiple pages into a PDF document is a job for HP's provided Solution Center software, not to mention for raising and closing the scanner lid and swapping pages in the absence of an ADF.

High-Quality Hard Copy

With the touch screen replacing all buttons and switches except for the power button, the Photosmart Plus has an exceptionally clean and elegant appearance -- a black box measuring some 18 by 16 by 8 inches, weighing a sturdy 16 pounds. The 125-sheet main paper tray and 20-sheet photo tray are stacked together up front, with printed pages exiting atop the latter.

Wireless (802.11b/g) printing and scanning is standard, as is a USB 2.0 interface -- there's even a USB cable in the box to use briefly during what was one of the easier WiFi setups we've encountered. The business-card-holder-sized cyan, magenta, yellow, and black ink cartridges snap simply into place, too.

The standard HP 564 cartridges are rated at 300 pages for yellow, cyan, and magenta ($10 each) and 250 pages for black ($12). When the originals run out, thrifty users will want to replace them with higher-capacity 564XL ink tanks, rated at 800 pages for black ($35) and 750 for color ($18 apiece). That divides out to 4.4 cents per black and 11.6 cents per color page, which underscores the Photosmart's position as a more graphical, less workaday printer -- it's more economical than many inkjets for color pages, but relatively pricey for black and white.

If you're printing mostly black text, you can get it in a hurry by using the printer's draft mode -- it yields rather pale, dot-patterned graphics, but pretty good, sufficiently dark text, taking only 47 seconds for a 10-page Word document and 13 seconds for a one-page business letter with spot-color company logo.

Stepping up to normal-mode printing slightly slowed the letter to 16 seconds and the 10-pager to 65, and took just under eight minutes for a 55-page Acrobat PDF document. As the default for walk-up copying, normal mode also delivered five copies of a monochrome page in 46 seconds and five color copies of a magazine cover in 1 minute and 50 seconds.

Normal mode provides crisp black text and handsome color headlines and illustrations, and also looked surprisingly good for photos (4 by 6-inch prints averaged exactly one minute), but showed some banding in dark solid-color areas. To eliminate the latter, and to bring out a little more detail and less grain in photos, you can opt for best-quality mode, which took about half again as long in our stopwatch tests.

Our tastes are skewed more toward IT -- well, at least small-office IT -- than consumer or family-photo-album applications, but we liked the Photosmart Plus. Its friendly touch screen (accompanied by even friendlier chirps and chimes) turns some fairly sophisticated tasks into easy pickings, and its output quality is thoroughly competitive.

Know what we'd really like to see? The same touch-screen interface on an all-in-one with a fax and automatic document feeder.

Tools:

Add hardwarecentral.com to your favorites Add hardwarecentral.com to your browser search box IE 7 | Firefox 2.0 | Firefox 1.5.x