Picture Perfect Without the Blues (HP Photosmart 7960)

Member Name: TheChocolateLady

Product:	HP Photosmart 7960
Date:	18/12/04 (439 review reads)
Rating:

Advantages: Separate paper tray for smaller paper,

Disadvantages: Had to get the instruction manual on-line,

My boss loves fancy electronic toys. One of the toys he's had for quite some time is a digital camera (he's on his second one already, actually). But one of the things that bothered him was that I was printing out his pictures on our plain black & white printer, on regular paper. That's why he decided to buy a fancy colour photo printer, and on the advice of a colleague of his, the HP Photosmart 7960 was the one he chose. Thing is, while this printer was available abroad for some time, we had to wait two months to purchase it here in Israel. Of course, our VAT being what it is, and import duties still being very high at the time, we ended up paying close to US$600 for our machine but I see from their web page that the listed price in the UK is £249 (see Technical Stuff below for URL and specifications of this model). Well, they say you get what you pay for, and I'm inclined to agree, this time.

From the picture above you can see that this is a pretty snazzy looking machine. I can tell you that even after having this now for quite some time, people still stop by my desk to admire it. It really is that bluish metallic colour which is a refreshing change of pace from all the other boring cream coloured hardware I've got, and a whole lot more sexy than all the black and dark gray coloured items I've seen around lately. Also, the buttons are a good size and they all have little icons on them to show you what they're for, besides having labels above them on the body of the machine.

But the really cute bit is the screen in the middle of the machine. This screen is a full 2.5 inches wide, which seems a tad small but isn't as small as you'd think. With this, when you plug a memory card or an HP camera into this printer, you can see the pictures on the screen. Then you can look at all the pictures on the card or camera without even downloading them or printing them. That screen also works as a menu for when you need to do special things like change preferences. It's also the area where you'll get messages when the paper runs out or the ink is too low. While the screen isn't terribly large, it is just large enough to get a good idea of what the pictures look like and all the messages and menus are very easy to read. I'd say that the font size of the menus is about 12pt - which is probably what you are seeing on your screen right now as you read this - and the font itself is very plain to make reading easier (my guess is its Ariel).

Then there's that lid on the top, underneath which you'll find two very convenient things. One is a well to put an extra ink cartridge (one only, which is nice but hardly useful - see below). The other and much more useful thing you'll find is the place where you put the memory cards or hook up your camera or laptop via USB cable. There are a whole bunch of slots there for the different memory cards which include: CompactFlash/IBM Microdrive memory card, SmartMedia/xD-Picture Card, MultiMediaCard/Secure Digital, and Sony Memory Stick. So far, I've been able to put cards from four different cameras into this printer and I've not had any problem fitting them in or with the printer reading the cards. This seems, therefore, to be compatible with probably any digital camera available on the market today. Of course, this is only an assumption on my part since I certainly haven't had the opportunity to try every single digital camera out on this printer - but I hope you won't blame me for that.

Then there's the Direct-Printing port, and it's for plugging in your laptop or camera directly to the printer. I haven't actually tried using this feature, but we did hook up one camera to it and were able to see the pictures on that camera. How it works with a laptop is beyond me - I just don't have a laptop to try it out, and the manual doesn't say much about it, either. Still, I've gotten so much use out of this printer, I hope you won't blame me for this.

The screen is located in an area which is surrounded by a cover, under which you'll find the place to install the ink cartridges and where you can fix any paper jams you might have. Paper jams - boy do I know about paper jams and HP printers. Every single HP printer that I've had at home has had problems with paper jams and taking too many pages. Hell, even my heavy-duty office printer (Laser Jet 4050) is starting to give me problems - especially with the manual feed tray. But somehow, at least so far, not this one. And trust me, I haven't only used fancy paper.

Which of course, brings me to the paper tray. There are actually two bins for paper - one for your regular size paper (A4 or Letter) and a smaller one for putting in smaller photo paper. What's cool about the small tray is - although it doesn't fit all that many sheets (about 15-20 tops) - is that after you put the paper in, you slide the whole mechanism into the printer so that the smaller sheets are then in line with the feed edge of the larger sheets. This means that you don't have to twist your arm or break your fingers (a sore spot with me these days) to get the small pages into the printer - just slide it out, put in the pages and slide it back in again. All of the paper part is underneath a shelf which is where the printed pages come out. This shelf flips up and out of the way nicely so that access to the paper is very easy. It also has a flip out extension so that the A4 pages won't go falling off of the printer when they come out.

By the way, when you open the cover, the ink cartridges move up and out of position so that replacing them is very easy indeed. Strange thing about this is that when I first got this printer, there was a fault in it and those spaces for the cartridges didn't move when we opened it up, and so we couldn't put the first inks into the machine. We sent this printer back to the supplier immediately but fortunately, the next day I had a new machine that worked perfectly. Remember, this is a machine that takes three separate ink cartridges. You use both the #57 and #58 tri-colour cartridges plus either the #56 black or the #59 photo gray cartridge. Personally, I have stopped using the #56 since I find that the #59 makes much clearer prints both on the matt or glossy photo paper as well as when making "contact sheets" using plain A4 paper. Why? Because while the #56 is great for the "contact sheets" it makes the pictures on the photo paper look grainy and out of focus. So, since the #59 is fine for both, I can stop buying four different ink types and just buy three kinds. Since original HP cartridges can cost anywhere between £17 and £24 per pop, you can guess that eliminating one purchase is certainly helpful. Mind you, I could go the way of refills but hey, its my office printer, not my home printer, so until my boss gets upset at having to stop by a Costco or Sam's Club every time he's in the US to get better prices on the ink, I'm not going to bother telling him about the refills.

So far, since I've been using this machine, I've changed the black cartridge twice, the #58 tri-colour cartridge three times and I'm still on my first #57 tri-colour cartridge. Seeing as I've printed out contact sheets for several hundreds of pictures, glossy and matt pictures by the several dozen and full-colour documents at a rate of 2-3 per week, I really shouldn't complain all that much about the cost of the ink, since it does seem to me that I'm not running through ink at any astounding rate - especially if we recall that colour printing always uses up more ink than B&W printing.

Of course, when you open this up, you'll get one each of the ink cartridges, you get the cables to hook it up. You'll also get an ink cartridge holder (I suppose that's for switching between the #56 and the #59 cartridges), you get a small package of photo paper, a quick guide, a setup guide and software for running the printer from your computer. You do NOT get a user manual. That you have to download from the Internet (URL below), and even so it's hardly a detailed manual. You also get a CD with the HP printing software as well as the proper driver for this.

One thing you should know. This printer connects to your computer via USB cable only, and there's only one place on the printer that connects. This means that if you are using this printer in your office and you want to connect your printer up to a server so that other people can print on it as well, then you'll have to find a special cable to do this. Note, however, that if you do this, you cannot access the memory cards from your personal computer anymore. If this printer had a serial port as well as the USB, then you could hook the computer up to the server via the serial port as well as to your own computer via the USB cable. Plus, finding a server cable that hooks up to the USB wasn't easy - but we did find one. Now, when someone else in the office wants to print on my printer, I have to unplug the USB that goes directly to my computer and plug in the server cable. Not a perfect solution for a large office, if you ask me. Still, most of the time people come to me with their memory cards, so its not such a big deal, and by default, I leave the printer hooked up to only my computer.

We quickly plugged the printer into the mains, and hooked it up to my computer. Then my computer asked for the software which came on automatically, we put the CD in and within about 8 minutes everything was all set up - including a cute little icon in my taskbar which is gray when there's no memory card in the machine and goes green when it detects a memory card. Very cute. Mind you, when the printer is hooked up to the server, you'll get a little red X on that icon to remind you that the printer isn't directly connected to your computer and that you can't download from the memory card. After that, it's mostly guess work since the instructions are, as I noted, sketchy. Still, there's not a hell of a lot you need to know about using a printer, is there? Actually, yes with this one there is, and unfortunately, you'll be left out in the cold with some of the features.

Mostly, when my boss comes back from a visit or trip somewhere, he hands me his camera and says "download the pictures". So, I take the memory card out of his camera, slip it into the proper slot under the lid and then I run the HP software, download the pictures (which will take them off the card, or not, as you see fit) and print out a contact sheet on plain A4 paper. Then my boss will go over the pictures and tell me which ones he wants prints of and which ones he just wants me to save or whatever.

When I want to make prints, I slip some matt or glossy paper into the appropriate tray, choose the picture and hit the print button - making sure that I choose the right printer (or it will default to my Laser Jet which is only black & white).

There is another step that I sometimes use. When I get the memory card, I like to review the pictures on the screen before downloading them. As you put the memory card in, the printer loads up the pictures and you'll then see the first one on the screen. You can then go through them in a few different ways. One way is a slide show - which personally I find flips through the pictures too quickly for my taste. You can also look at them one at a time by using a button that has arrows on it. Right and left will take you one picture forward or backwards, up and down will take you to the first or last pictures on the card. Pretty simple that (and I didn't need the manual to figure that out - good thing, since its not there). When I'm going through the pictures, I like to take that opportunity to rotate any pictures that have been taken when the camera was turned. This will actually fix them on the card so that when you download you don't have to rotate them on your computer. However, going through hundreds of pictures just to find the ones to rotate isn't always time efficient.

Basically, it's pretty simple to use this printer. Mind you, I still haven't figured out (because of that useless manual) how to print directly to the printer from the card. And if you pardon me, I'm not going to look this up via the software help since the software is already pretty heavy to begin with. Yes, there is a problem with the software. I've noticed that all the HP colour printers seem to come with this package and while you can do quite a bit with it, it also uses up lots and lots of your ram while it's running. It's particularly bothering at work since I end up having to close up all of my other applications just to download from the memory card in a reasonable amount of time. This could be because I'm usually downloading over 100 pictures per session, but even when I have just a handful of pics on the card, it still gobbles up ram. I don't like getting warning messages that my virtual memory is running low, but more times than not, even if I close all the other programs on my computer, I'll get that message. HP's bad, if you ask me!

Another feature is supposed to be e-mailing the pictures directly from the printer. I press the button but nothing happens. I don't know what I'm doing wrong, but there you have it. There's another button that says "print new photos" but that as well doesn't want to work for me. Nor does the button marked "save" which from the icon on the button is for saving pictures to a folder. The only buttons that seem to work right are the rotate button, the zoom button and the select photos button and the OK button. Mind you all these features on the printer itself really are duplicated on the software for your computer so I really shouldn't complain - it's just, if they have these as buttons, why can't they explain how to use them properly - like making more than one copy and such? Heavens, HP, couldn't you be more thoughtful of your customers in this area?

Oh, what the hell - the real reason why you get a printer like this one isn't all the fancy buttons, it's so you can print out photo quality pictures.

Here's the real thing, isn't it? I mean, I could use this as my bottom line for this review, because this is really the reason why you would want to buy this printer. I have to say that despite all the other niggles on this printer, this is really where this comes up trumps. Just as an experiment, we took one of the pictures that I had printed on this printer and we sent it to a print shop to print it out there. On purpose, we used some Kodak paper with my printer so the only way you could tell the difference between the papers was if you looked on the back and saw that my print didn't have the picture information typed out on it. No body in the whole office could see any difference between the picture I had printed out and the one that the photo shop had printed out. In fact, most people thought that the one I had made seemed brighter and clearer and sharper than the one from the photo shop.

One of my favorite things that I did with this printer was to print out passport photos for my boss. Mind you, it took me some fiddling around with the software to figure out how to do this (meaning, taking one picture and having it appear a whole bunch of times on the same page), but in the end I ended up with a great batch of passport pictures that look identical to the ones that you would get if you get them professionally done. I'm thinking that part of the quality of the printing is due to using a staggering 7 different colours of ink in three different cartridges.

And how fast is this printer? Simply put - pretty fast indeed! The specifics below say that black printing is 22 pages per minute and colour is 16 pages per minute. On the few occaisions that I've printed something in B&W on this printer, it seems to me to come out only slightly slower than my big old (discontinued) HP LaserJet 4050 - which I'd say is about 26-28ppm, minimum. Very satisfactory, in my book.

Where it really counts - the printing quality of photos, and its speed - this printer comes up trumps. Its also very pretty looking, doesn't give me grief with any of the different types of paper I feed into it, has some cool features like that screen, seems as economical on ink as is physically possible, and - something I didn't mention before - is a very quiet machine while working. Where this machine falls short is that there's no user manual to speak of, the fancy looking buttons on it don't all seem to work, and the software is very heavy on ram. Would I buy this printer for my home? Never! Its way too expensive for my simple home needs. Would I recommend this printer for an office or business that has more than a couple of digital cameras? Absolutely, without a moment's hesitation. So, if you're looking for a nice photo printer for your home - look for something cheaper, but if your office is footing the bill - give this one a careful look. Four stars out of five.

Thanks for reading!

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Technical Stuff:
I found all this information, and more on the HP webpage which can be found at http://welcome.hp.com/country/uk/en/welcome.html

Summary: Colour printer with multiple card readers that's good but a touch complex

Processing/Quality:
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Ease of use:
Print quality: