HP's flagship falls short
Written: Oct 02 '03 (Updated Oct 21 '03)
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Pros: Grayscale printing, direct prints from digital camera media. Mac support. Automatic paper type detection.
Cons: Costly ink. Uneven print surface. Limited choice of media. No large prints. No PictBridge.
The Bottom Line: Color image quality does not match that of digital photo labs. Grayscale images are excellent for an inkjet printer, but cheaper HP models (HP 7660) do the job as well.
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| majid's Full Review: Hewlett Packard PhotoSmart 7960 Thermal Inkjet Pri... |
Photo quality inkjet printers have come a long way in terms of quality. The HP 7960 printer is the flagship in a new line of printers, after 2 years in which HP's aging product line compared unfavorably to new models from Epson and Canon. At the same time, digital photography has come of age and digicams have overtaken film cameras in unit sales this year.
People are sharing photos by email more often nowadays (this is not a new phenomenon, I remember visiting AT&T in 1997, when they told us the bulk of digital photos sent around Thanksgiving and Christmas almost overwhelmed their mail servers, and they had to add additional servers in a hurry to cope with the growth in traffic). Still, most people will want prints at some point in time.
At this point, the question of who will win the battle to print our digital photos is still very much undecided. The big inkjet manufacturers (HP, Epson, Canon and Lexmark) are obviously contenders. On the other side are traditional film companies like Fuji, Kodak/Noritsu and Agfa, who make it possible to get prints on real photo paper from digital photos on their latest digital minilabs, slowly being deployed in the same places you would expect 1-hour processing. There also are a few more exotic technologies like dye sublimation or Fuji's Pictrography, but they are nowhere near as widespread.
My previous printer, a HP Photosmart P1000 (one of the first models capable of printing directly from CompactFlash or SmartMedia cards without a computer), yielded coarse prints that would fade within 6 months. I got so dissatisfied with the result I sold it off and used Wal-Mart's online photo printing, then Costco's, on Fuji Crystal Archive paper (durability rated at 60-70 years by independent researcher Henry Wilhelm).
I am an avid amateur photographer, and do a mix of color digital photography using my Canon 10D digital SLR and traditional black & white film using a Leica M6 rangefinder. I mostly print my B&W negatives on a traditional optical enlarger in a conventional (wet) darkroom, but sometimes I want the fine control offered by the digital darkroom, specially when I make contact prints after scanning my negs on a Nikon Coolscan IVED film scanner.
Unfortunately, black & white prints made on color photo paper from scanned grayscale images are never completely neutral and usually have a purple to blue tone, and so the Fuji Frontier prints were out. Older color inkjets are even worse, as they try to simulate grays by mixing various cyan, magenta and black inks, yielding muddy colors with strong and objectionable color casts, usually green or purple. Many fine art photographers are getting superb results using specially modified Epson inkjet printers using the Piezography system. In Piezography, the normal cyan, magenta, yellow and black inks used for color printing are replaced by different shades of gray, and when mixed, this allows for a near continuous palette of gray tones. Furthermore, as the Piezography inks are made from ground carbon pigment, they are archival to at least 200 years, actually better than silver black and white prints (carbon printing is an ancient photographic technique and is considered one of the highest forms of photographic printing art, along with platinum printing). Unfortunately, the pigment has a tendency to clump and Piezography printers have a reputation for clogging up and other finicky behavior.
When HP introduced its new line of printers, they also introduced a new cartridge, number 59, which replaces the number 56 black cartridge. The number 59 is a tri-color cartridge that has three shades of gray, and operates much like the Piezography system, but in a more convenient package supported by a major manufacturer. This was the main reason I bought the printer.
I compared prints made on Agfa resin-coated silver B&W paper, Fuji Crystal Archive Pro color photo prints made on a high-end Lightjet digital enlarger, and prints from the HP 7960 on both the glossy and matte HP Premium Plus Photo papers. In daylight, the Agfa print is slightly warm, the Fuji print has a slight blue tone, and the HP prints both have strong blue tone. Under incandescent light, the Agfa print is slightly warm, the Fuji is close to neutral and the HP prints have a slight purple tone. Under fluorescent light, the Agfa print is neutral, the Fuji print has a slight purple tone and the HP prints have strong purple tone. The HP prints give better highlight detail than the Fuji, but fall short of the Agfa. The HP solution is not the silver bullet B&W aficionados were waiting for, but it is acceptable for proof prints or contact sheets.
Update (2003-10-21): the color cast seems to be an issue when the printer is new. After a few weeks of use, the ink cartridge "settles down" and seems far more neutral. It is not clear whether (1) this problem will reoccur with every new No. 59 cartridge, (2) or whether it was a defect in the cartridge I have, (3) or whether it only happens the first few days after a printer is put in service. As HP cartridges include the print head, I suspect it is option 1 or 2. This would increase the cost of the prints further by increasing waste, but the good news is, the grayscale output from the printer is competitive with the darkroom given the superior level of control you get from Photoshop, and this is the first mass-market printer that can really make this claim.
If you want to print grayscale photos, you should be very careful to select "grayscale" as the option in the print properties dialog (at least on a Mac). If you just leave the (color) defaults, the printer will actually use color inks, yielding muddy, unacceptably purple-tinged prints. This puts to the lie HP's claims of 8-color printing, and you should not expect neutral colors to be truly neutral in color printing.
I also made a color test print from a high-resolution (29MB) stock photo from Photodisc. The colors are vivid, as with most dye-based inkjet printers. When viewed under a 10x Peak loupe, the halftone patterns are clearly visible, whereas there are no visible artifacts on Fuji Frontier photo prints (which use conventional Fuji Crystal Archive photo paper, exposed using red, green and blue lasers). Halftone patterns are combination of dots from the 6 different color inks to simulate the continuous-tone colors of photographs. You need a large number of dots to simulate one pixel, thus, the 4800x1200 dots per inch rated resolution of the printer corresponds to at best a 200-300 pixels per inch continuous-tone digital photo. This does not even factor the fact that even if the ink drop is positioned to an accuracy of 1/4800th of an inch by the stepping motors driving the print nacelle or the paper feed rollers, the ink drops themselves splatter on the paper and do not necessarily have dimensions that are that finely constrained. The resolution ratings for printers are mostly marketing specmanship with no real relation to print quality.
Inkjet cartridges are outrageously priced. At $25 for 17ml, the HP 59 cartridge is twice as expensive, ounce for ounce, as Chanel Number 5 Eau de Toilette ($85 for 100ml). This is because inkjet manufacturers adopt the Gillette "give away the razor, sell the blades" strategy, and sell printers for a low up front price, fully intending to compensate with price gouging afterwards. Third party inks are not a viable option as they fade alarmingly fast and do not offer consistent color. I estimate a single HP 59 cartridge is good for about 40 8x10 prints. If using the lowest cost HP Premium Plus Photo glossy paper in packs of 50, this comes out to about $1.25 per page for a grayscale print. In comparison, high-grade Ilford silver/fiber paper used in darkroom printing costs about $0.60 per sheet for 8x10. If you are using color, more cartridges are involved, and since you do not have a separate cartridge per color, some ink will inevitably be wasted when one color runs out. Color 8x10 prints should thus run anywhere between $1.50 to $2.
Given this price, it is easier to understand why HP is putting digital media readers in their printers - they want to increase their paper and ink sales when people print proof sheets. You can also print directly from a HP digital camera using a USB cable, but not with other brands of cameras using the recently finalized PictBridge standard. The small LCD monitor is useful to select a photo for direct printing, but has nowhere near sufficient resolution to determine whether the picture is going to turn out fine or not. For this reason, I recommend previewing the pictures on a PC or Mac and only printing them after having made the necessary adjustments to reduce waste.
There are two different kinds of inkjet inks. The most common ones are dye-based inks, where synthetic dyes similar to those used for clothing are dissolved in the ink's solvent. The other kind are pigment inks, where color pigment particles are suspended in solvent, the way the old masters suspended pigments in linseed oil. Pigment inks are far more durable, whereas dyes fade when exposed to ultraviolet rays or atmospheric pollutants like ozone. Epson is the only major manufacturer to use pigment inks in its high-end Stylus Photo 2200 printer, very popular among fine art photographers.
To last, dye-based inks have to be protected from contaminants and ultraviolet rays. Conventional photo prints also use dyes to form colors, and those dyes are protected by gelatin. HP has a similar technology known as swellable polymer, where the ink penetrates a special plastic coating that swells after exposure to the ink solvent, thus sealing the ink and protecting it. Henry Wilhelm rates the HP prints at 75 years, but only when made on the HP swellable polymer papers, sold under the HP Premium Plus brand.
HP Premium Plus is only available in a glossy and a matte finish. The glossy finish has a slight texture to it, and is not perfectly smooth. The "matte" paper isn't really matte at all, more like a semi-gloss. Many professional photographers like to print with Epson pigment inks on cotton rag watercolor papers, yielding amazingly velvety true matte prints. This cannot be done with dye-based inks without compromising durability to an unacceptable degree.
An unfortunate consequence of using swellable polymer paper is that highlight areas, that receive little or no ink, do not swell as much as areas that receive a lot of ink, and the end result are prints that have distracting three-dimensional raised shadow or color relief alternating with flat highlights. This is also evident to the touch. Epson has just introduced in Japan a technology where highlight areas are also sprayed with uncolored solvent to yield a flat print, but HP does not have that technology out yet. The silver lining is, blind people finally have an affordable braille printer...
The final disadvantage of dye-based inks on swellable polymer paper is that the prints take a long time to dry and "cure", to the order of a few hours, thus voiding the instant gratification aspect of home printing. I let my prints dry overnight.
There are a few other noteworthy points. The printer is limited to 8.5" wide prints (letter and legal), and cannot produce the 11x14" prints now attainable with 6 megapixel digital cameras. Secondly, the paper feeding path is curved, not straight. I have not had problems, but I suspect this is more prone to jamming than Epson's straight-through path. On the plus side, the HP has a paper sensor that makes the error-prone process of selecting the paper type from the print driver dialog a thing of the past, at least when using HP paper (if you are using third-party paper, expect your prints to fade quickly, as explained above). I just wish they had the same level of intelligence in picking up color vs. grayscale.
I eventually returned the printer and bought an HP 7660 for half the price. I will keep making my color prints on my local Costco's Noritsu digital minilab, and do not need the 8-ink capabilities of the 7960 since I would not be using them when printing grayscale. The 7660 is capable of 6-color printing, albeit with the hassle of swapping back and forth between the No. 59 photo gray and the No. 58 photo color cartridges.
I won't go into the technical details on the printer, as they can be accessed at the URL:
http://h10010.www1.hp.com/wwpc/us/en/ho/WF06b/18972-236251-64340-15100-f12-305382-305384-305385.html
Recommended:
No
Amount Paid (US$): 299
Operating System: Macintosh
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Epinions.com ID:
majid
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Member: Fazal Majid
Location: San Francisco
Reviews written: 53
Trusted by: 5 members
About Me:
I'm the CTO of an Internet startup
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