great prints - another reliable HP product
Written: Mar 19 '03 (Updated Apr 04 '03)
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Pros: print quality.
holds extra 3-color cartridge.
media card slots.
holds 4x6 photo paper.
Cons: expensive ink cartridges.
slow access time of the media slots.
bad install program.
The Bottom Line: Great prints, reliable operation - that's the bottom line for me.
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| seekins's Full Review: Hewlett Packard HP PhotoSmart 7550 Ink-jet Printer |
I bought this model over the 7350 model because it can hold the extra cartridge giving you "7 color printing" (on the lesser models you can still do 6 color prints, but you have to swap out the black cartridge for the other color cartridge). In addition, I wanted the media card interfaces. I didn't buy it for the neat-o color LCD (I thought of that as a "bonus").
On plain inkjet paper, the image quality is really very good; on premium glossy inkjet photo paper the print quality is spectacular (although, pretty much all the printers in this price range are pretty amazing) and they claim that the prints will last 50 years. It is pretty peppy when you are just doing normal printing (vs. say an 8x10 24bit 4M pixel photo). I do appreciate the special little tray that this printer has for storing 4x6 photo paper, even with normal paper in the hopper. The ink cartridges are relatively expensive, but I think that is a pretty common problem these days. Also, the cartridges have chips in them, so I'm not sure they can be refilled (if you are into that). The paper handling so far has been rock solid - I have printed over 500 sheets and I haven't had a misfeed yet.
The machine is pretty solid, as are most HP printers. I don't think I could park a truck on it like you could with the old HP printers, but in comparison to the others in the store this one felt more sturdy. It does take up a lot of desk space though.
The user interface (via an LCD and some buttons on the top) for viewing, doing some simple editing and printing pictures (including "proof sheets") is pretty simple. I can see how this would be really useful for someone (like my Mom) who wasn't really computer savvy and wanted to view and print picture from her digital camera.
However, the slow access time of the media slots pretty much renders them useless. Which is unfortunate, since it has slots for Compact Flash, Smartmedia, MemoryStick and MMC. It is really just much too slow. It takes nearly 5 times longer for me to copy the images from a CF using the slot on the 7550 than it does using my standard $14 USB CF reader (Dazzle). Also - while it is copying from the card, my Win98 (1.4G, 512M) machine is pretty much unusable for anything else. While I'm downloading off of my Dazzle reader, I can still read email, websurf, whatever. I'm hoping these issues are either Win98 related, or driver related (vs. say, a hardware limitation).
It also has a separate USB port on it for interfacing directly to digital cameras - I haven't actually tried it yet, but I don't really see the point - you can just remove the card from the camera and put it in the slot on the printer. Maybe the access time from the camera is better? I don't know.
The software that comes with it is pretty standard for HP - good quality. Pretty decent. I am a little annoyed that you can't get the printer to print in the super duper extra special mode (4800x1200 "optimized") without fibbing to the printer configuration and telling it you are using "HP Premium Photo Paper". I've tried a few different papers and the prints on the cheaper "premium photo" paper look just as good as those on the HP paper - so, I'm sure it's just a gimmick.
The install program was pretty stupid and does a check of your C drive to look for free space - and bails out if you don't have the entire required 500MB of free space. So, even if you have an entire 100G drive on D, but only 300M on C, it won't install. Period.
One annoying thing everyone needs to know is that HP has no 800 number for tech support - you have to dial long distance. As a result, the wait times are much shorter, but anything complicated like "why won't your driver install on my machine that has 100G free?".
Oh - one last thing - this printer supports an optional duplex unit so you can print double sided!
Recommended:
Yes
Amount Paid (US$): 249 w/rebate
Operating System: Windows
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Epinions.com ID:
seekins
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Reviews written: 8
Trusted by: 0 members
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