Photo Printers

HP being the 5th largest software company retains its global leadership position in laser, inkjet, large format and multi-function printers market. HP Photosmart A826 Compact photo printer is an outstanding product among the wide range of HP photo printers. Photosmart A826 shatters the statements like photo printers are generally small machines with tiny screens as it comes with a dedicated touch screen. This would enable the users to control all the actions in a fingertip.

Design:

The HP Photosmart A826 Inkjet photo printer comes with a smooth plastic body with rounded edges. It has a wide base of 264mm with narrower stop, 274mm tall and 244mm deep. It weighs around 2.6kg. The highlight of this printer is that it has a 178mm touch-screen and a totally enclosed paper. This photo printer holds a dedicated button which offers captions, frames, simple albums and a drawing function. Using the stylus, we can doodle over the photo and captions can be added by tapping an onscreen keyboard. We can customize the captions by selecting desired fonts and colours. It is also possible to re-size and move the caption on-screen. Four memory card slots, a PictBridge USB port and a plastic stylus in its own holder would be present when we flip down the front cover/paper output tray. A single print cartridge is hidden by a small panel on the printer’s front.

Paper Inputs in A826:

We can protect the paper from dust as we have an option to load around 100 sheets of 152 by 102mm or 178 by 127mm paper and close the lid which is hardly possible in other printers. The paper can be loaded by flipping the top panel of the printer.

Features of HP Photosmart A826:

The Photosmart A826 being a standalone photo printer is a boon, which can be used PC-free and thus most of its features are incorporated in touch screen. It is nowhere less than other photo printers as we can set this printer to print from PC. The four memory card slots and PictBridge port makes it possible and easy to print from a memory card or PictBridge devices like a camera or camera phone as well. An optional USB Bluetooth adapter has been offered by HP for wireless printing.

A single touch could control most of the actions like viewing the image, editing and cropping. It has an option to view the images through slide shows and customizing the same. Editing the image is possible as there is an edit option when we look at a particular picture. Adjusting the brightness, reducing the red eye and cropping is possible with the edit option. Zooming in, zooming out and rotating the cropped area between portrait and landscape modes is very simple with crop feature.

One of the wealthy options of Photosmart A826 is the Get Creative option which enables users to add captions, frames, drawing on images, adding clip art, designing album pages and also imparting colour effects. Stylus can be used to edit the captions by changing the fonts, resizing or rotating the image.

In practical, Album option is not up to the mark as it has very limited options which really frustrate users. It allows us to change the album theme, layout and select the photos to be produced. In addition to the quality photo prints, if we have the proper paper, HP Photosmart A826 Colour Photo Printer can be used for panoramic prints, passport photos, photo stickers and CD/DVD tattoos.

Printing Speed:

HP Photosmart A826 has the capability to print 2.37 pages per minute for 152 by 102mm prints. This is a fabulous score when compared to other printers like Epson Stylus R380, Epson PictureMate Snap, and HP Photosmart D7360. The photos offered by Photosmart A826 are really good with lively colours and sharp details.

Performance:

The performance of Photosmart A826 is outstanding when compared to non-snapshot printers. The quality of the photos printed is awesome. Photosmart A826 proves its effectiveness by printing 2.37 pages per minute for 152 by 102mm prints. It has the ability to handle 180x 130mm prints as well as 152 x 102mm prints.

A826 Warranty Information:

Standard one-year limited hardware warranty. Warranty and support options vary by product, country and local legal requirements.

Verdict:

Hewlett Packard Photosmart A826 Compact photo printer is a standalone little printer with a wide dedicated touch screen and build-in paper tray which provides quality photos. This printer would be apt for people who are in need of a standalone printer in their room. Though Photosmart A826 is bit expensive, it is worth for the value.


HP Photosmart A826 - Technical Specifications, Features

Manufacturer	HP
Model Name	Photosmart A826
Printer Type	Colour Inkjet printer
Dimensions	264 x 274 x 244 mm
Weight	2.6kg
Display	14.2 cm LCD (colour graphics), touch screen
Print Speed (Colour Photo, Draft Quality) on Photo Paper	39 sec
Black print resolution	Up to 1200 x 1200 dpi
Colour print resolution	Up to 4800 x 1200 optimised dpi
Print technology	HP Thermal Inkjet
Printer memory	64MB
Print cartridges	HP 110 Tri-colour Inkjet Print Cartridge
Supported paper sizes	Sheets: Up to 100 Standard Media Sizes: 100 x 150 mm, 130 x 180 mm, 100 x 300 mm Custom Media Sizes: 100 x 150 mm, 130 x 180 mm, 100 x 300 mm Media Types supported: Photo paper
Memory Card Compatibility	CompactFlash™ Type I and II, Magic Gate, Memory Stick®, Memory Stick Pro®, Secure Digital/MultiMediaCard, SmartMedia, xD-Picture Card
Standard connectivity	USB 2.0, PictBridge, memory card slots
Optional connectivity	HP bt500 Bluetooth USB 2.0 Adapter, (Q6273A)HP bt450 Bluetooth Printer Adapter (Q6398A), HP Wireless Printing Upgrade Kit (Q6259A)
Supported operating systems	Windows® XP Home, Windows® XP Professional, Windows Vista® Ready, Mac OS X v10.3.9, Mac OS X v10.4, Intel® Mac
Print languages	HP PCL3
EPA Energy Star Compliant	No
Warranty	1 year

Remember the creative design of Canon Pixma MX330, and append the excellent functionality of Canon Pixma MX7600, complete it with built-in Wi-Fi, and that shows you the new model Canon Pixma MX860. It is the only printer which offers wireless amongst  all models available, retaining all its features like print, scan, fax and copy. Canon MX860 All-in-One Printer is worthy to the purchasers who need multifunctional printer at a very affordable cost in-spite of small stumbles in the output quality.

Size And Setup:

Canon MX860 Photo Printer is identical in shape to the model Pixma MX330, with dimensions measuring 18.1 inches wide, 16.2 inches deep, 7.8 inches height with grooved grips under the device that makes easy to relocate it. The setup is standard for a Canon printer, remove the packing materials, snap in the printer head and ink cartridges, load the paper into trays, connect the cables and run the initial installation routine.

Design:

Because of the curved edges and incorporated control panel it apparently makes the printer look very sleek, captivating appeal makes it suitable to office as well as home usage. Inside the orderly organised control panel the large 2.5 inches LCD screen is fixed. The left part puts up the power button along with short cuts for copy, fax and scanning and the right part bears the normal make out of menu, settings, navigation buttons and numerical keys. Canon Pixma MX860 Wireless Photo Printer also developed few extra buttons to make it modernised by including consecrated Memory card button for copying and printing images directly from the reader at the bottom and some small keys which automatically dial your preset fax numbers.

Paper Inputs:

Canon provides three different choices for paper input. The simplest method is through the 150-sheets tray that pull from the bottom of the folding output bay. You can load another 150 sheets into another rear-loading cassette, and both trays have small plastic guides to fit an assortment of sizes from 4 inch X 6 inch al the way up to legal-sized media and envelopes of size No. 10. The versatility  of the dual paper feeds gives the user ample choice to store small photo paper in the rear tray and 8 inch X 10 inch sheets in the front tray. The driver also does an excellent job by selecting right tray and paper for any specific job. The auto-document feeder holds only 35 sheets of plain paper to copy or scan which sits on the top of the device is the third and last paper input tray. Similar to the other trays that extend out, the ADF nicely sits back into the body of the printer.

Ink Cartridges:

The scanner bay is hidden in the middle of the printer which can also be propped open to reveal the Canon MX860’s five-ink cartridge bay that consists of four dye-based ink cartridges( yellow, cyan, magenta and black) and one pigment based ink cartridge for black text. We are often of great interest to have separate ink cartridge bays as it saves money, MX860 also has the same system.

About The Card Reader:

It is a matter to be very happy as MX860 colour inkjet photo printer included a committed, covered media card reader, specially since we battered the MX330 for its deletion. The card reader is located at the bottom of the unit to the right of the paper output tray and has slots for MS Duo, SD/MS and compact flash cards. Using MX860, when you plug in a card there are two ways to print out the contents; you can either pick many pictures to create a batch print using the navigation pad, or you can view,edit and print individual pictures directly on the LCD. Red-eye reduction, colour effects like sepia and black-and-white, noise reduction, image optimiser, and so on can be done in manual edits. A compatible digital camera can be directly connected to the printer using PictBridge USB port.

Features of Canon MX860:

Different Connections Available:
Canon MX860 by default prints, scans and copies over a USB 2.0 connection, but you can also connect it to the wired network through the Ethernet port which is present on the back or to a wireless network using Wi-Fi. To create an ad-hoc connection over a router, first the software needs to establish a USB connection. The set up assistant on the driver allows us to print wirelessly in less than 5 minutes, and we were able to connect using both Mac and PC.

Photo Editing In The Printer:
A driver installation CD comes with a robust software suite which comes along with the printer will definitely appeal to users creative side. The MX860’s settings lets you cycle between usually used quality templates like standard, business, paper-saving  and photo-printing which automatically adjusts paper size and orientation, paper and output quality. The driver permits to go deeper into photo editing with many choices for bright photos, border less, monochrome effects, and even manual colour adjustments, while pop-up status monitor gives you a heads up view of the job status, document name, printer status and a rough idea of the ink levels. We mostly prefer the status monitor on the driver which comes along with MX860 which is an disadvantage in the case of MX330 that do not show printer progress.

Use Of Canon’s Easy Photo Print EX Software:

The Canon MX860 driver automatically installs Canon’s Easy Photo Print EX software onto the PC which flashes all the creative features of the MX330. This software allows you to print simple snapshot photos on the fly, create whole albums with art work and print calendars with custom pictures and custom stickers using Canon’s proprietary sticker paper. The explorer window on the main page works similar to the Windows Explorer pane, except that we mostly prefer HP’s Solution center layout that automatically scans and detects printable pictures on your hard drive. The Canon’s creative suite is unbelievably easy to use which also allows you to make simple photo edits like red-eye correction, face sharpening and blemish removal which is great for yours who do not want other people editing the photos using software like Adobe Photoshop.

Copy Functions:

For a multifunction device the copy functions on MX330 are relatively standard, some of them are you can make 99 copies at a time and can easily adjust the contrast and the magnification of a document from 25 to 400 percent, all are done directly through the settings on the LCD menus. Using the automatic document feeder the scanner gives you two options to scan either single photos and document or a stack of documents. MX860 provides many choices in terms of where you want to send a scanned document, such as to PC as JPEG, TIFF, BMP or to a PDF file or you can attach to an email with an option to convert and scan to text using optical character recognition. All the scanned copies are saved in your custom ‘My Box’ directory in which you can also find all imported and scanned as well as recently saved images on to the hard drive for future projects.

Printing Speed of MX860:

Canon multi functioning printers are never titled for high speed printing and MX860 also continues in the same trend. It takes 12.2 seconds to print the first page of mono draft documents and 15.8 for colour documents. Mono draft documents printed at an average speed of 10.6 pages per minute, where as it is 7.9 ppm for a normal quality document. The colour print takes more time.

Performance:

Canon Pixma MX860 all-in-one printer has the whip hand on the competition when it comes to the print speeds, setting the race in the colour graphics speed, single-photo speed, grayscale scan, and black test copy speed tests. The new model stands ahead of MX330 except in text, where it printed only 4.47 pages per minute compared to MX330’s 5.54ppm, knotting the first place to HP OfficeJet J6480. The text copy rate is 3.48ppm, Grayscale scan is 4.1 ppm, Photo speed is1.28 sheets, colour graphic speed is 2.29ppm.

Warranty Information:

Canon MX860 comes with a one year warranty for parts and labor under Canon’s Instant Exchange Services. If Canon cannot fix the problem by phone for printer under warranty, it will ship you a replacement along with a prepaid return shipping label. Canon picks up the cost of shipping in both the directions.

Verdict:

When compared to the two other printers which bracket Canon in the price, you will find balance in the features of Canon MX860 like particularly in the output print quality(better than the Epson Workforce 310), in price(lower than HP Photosmart Premium Fax All-in-one), prints, scans and faxes over network and even offers a wide array of functions, but its small paper tray and the printing speed makes it relatively slow for business purposes. A shopper who is looking for a printer to use in home or small business with a varied range of features at an affordable price and not bothered about the print speed doubtlessly Canon MC860 is an extremely best buy compared with the similarly priced competitors.

Check 2009 model latest photo printers, Canon Photo Printer Reviews in this website.



Canon MX860 Multifunction Printer - Technical Specifications, Features

Manufacturer	Canon
Model Name	MX860 All-in-One Printer
Printer Category	Inkjet
Type	All-in-one
Colour or Monochrome	1-pass colour
Ink Jet Type	Standard All-Purpose
Connection Type	USB, Ethernet, Wireless
Maximum Standard Paper Size	Legal
Copier Reduce/Enlarge	25% to 400%
Maximum Number Of Copies	99
Number Of Cartridges	5
Number of Ink Colours	5
Direct Printing From Cameras	Yes
Direct Printing From Media Slots	CompactFlash Type I, CompactFlash Type II, Microdrive, Memory Stick, Memory Stick Pro, Memory Stick Duo, Memory Stick Pro Duo, MultiMedia Card, xD-Picture Card, MiniSD Card.
LCD Preview Screen	Yes
Scanner Type	Flatbed with ADF(Standard or Optional)
Scanner Optical Resolution	2400 dpi X 4800 dpi
Maximum Scan Area	8.5″ X 14″
Standalone Copier and Fax	Copier, Fax
Input Capacity(printer input only)	300 sheets
Network-Ready	Yes
Duplexing	Yes
Cost Per Page	Mono: 4 cents Colour: 12 cents
Warranty	One year

K7100 - A3+ colour photo printer from Hewlett Packard

HP has come up with a series of printers that are designed especially for small office business users who are looking for a versatile and affordable A3+ printer that is capable of producing a wide range of office materials like letters, photos, flyers and other marketing materials. Here we review a printer in that series, the HP Officejet K7100.

Simple design:

The Officejet K7100 inkjet printer has got a very modest design. It looks professional in its matte black finish with white linings. The center part alone of the printer has a glossy finish, quite attractive though. You will not find many controls in the facia of the printer. It just has three buttons for power, page resume and cancel options. It does not have a very large foot print either, it is moderate with its dimensions being just (w x d x h) 574.5 x 409.5 x 186.3 mm and weighing just 10.2 kg.

Installation of K7100:
The process of installation of K7100 Colour Inkjet Printer is quite simple and straight forward. But make sure you do not connect the printer to a Windows server system as the printer does not support it. And if you do indent to do so, load the printer’s drivers on to the server initially. Once the installation starts, the routine loads in the software bundle that includes HP’s web printing tools and its PhotoSmart Essential for manipulating photographs.

The extra tool box that is offered provides you with utilities that does a wide range of handy tasks like estimating the remaining ink levels and launching pop-up warnings if errors are detected. Once the print mileage feature is enabled, it allows you to track the general usage, and this sends the printing information to HP’s website for you to view.

Features:

With HP Officejet K7100 A3+ inkjet photo printer you will be able to produce very attractive materials up to A3+ with four inks or an optional six ink colour. There are options to print with or without borders in standard and custom sizes. This model uses the latest HP Vivera office ink which produces office quality photos. The speciality of this ink is that, it dries off real quickly and you can enjoy the best results when the printing is done on HP Everyday Paper that features colour lock technology. Using the standard four ink colour you can create high impact materials else you can also choose to have professional photo quality with the optional six ink colour. With the help of the poster printing option, the documents can be enlarged to up to 25 times their original size.

A slow coach:

Coming to the print speeds, though it is stated in the specifications that the K7100 Border less photo printer has the ability to achieve the top A4 speeds of about 25 ppm for mono and 20 ppm for colour, this rate can possibly be achieved only in draft mode. When put into testing, even with the settings set to the fast draft mode, the printer was able to achieve the print speed of only 17ppm. And as the quality of the prints is increased in the settings, the print speed reduces drastically. With the print quality set to average, the printer prints at only 8.5ppm and when you are aiming at the best quality, it gives you just 1.2ppm. K7100 makes the task of printing quite boring. For those who plan to do any colour printing, bring your iPod with you as the print speed is an awful 3ppm in normal mode.

Colour photographs take quite a long time too. An A4 sized colour photograph takes about four minutes, at the maximum setting. The photos come out in a resolution of 4,800 x 1,200dpi. If this is the case for A4 prints, then you will certainly need some patience for printing A3 photos. The print speed is about 1.4ppm in its normal mode and hence, if you are printing a full sized photo book at the highest quality as you would wish, the entire process takes about ten minutes.

Excellent print quality:

So far, the print speeds might have been disappointing news for you, but once you look at the output, you will get the feeling that it is worth the wait. The colour prints are of very good quality. Text looks great at the highest quality setting, but with anything less than that you will find some smudging. The colour balance in the photographs are quite good, they are sharp and the details are fine too. Banding, which is one of the major issues with most of the printers is invisible in the charts, photos and graphs printed using Hewlett Packard Officejet K7100 A3+ printer. This printer is very professional and it manages to pick even the minute details in the darker areas which the other printers of the same category fail to capture.

Cost effectiveness:

The only major issue with the A3 colour printers is that, they are quite expensive when compared with the A4 printers and this extra cost might be a bit of a burden for the small business investors. But this model, the Officejet K7100 seems to be just the perfect solution for this problem as it costs a mere £160.

Coming to the cost effectiveness of the printer, it works out that monochrome printing comes to around 2.7 pence per page and for colour printing it comes around 7.9 pence per page. Hence, monochrome printing is quite costly and colour printing is reasonable.

Warranty:

HP offers one year limited warranty for its Officejet K7100 A3+ colour inkjet printer.

Verdict:

The HP Officejet K7100 does a great job when the “Quality” factor is concerned. But its very low speed and high running costs, makes it an unlikely choice for printing jobs in small office and homes. Hence, if you are looking at quality large format colour prints, irrespective of the printing speed, K7100 is a good choice. This inkjet printer delivers excellent output considering its price tag.

Check 2009 Best selling Photo Printers, Reviews of Hewlett Packard Photo Printers in this website.

HP Officejet K7100 Colour Printer - Technical Specification Table

Manufacturer	HP
Model Name	HP Officejet K7100
Printer type	Inkjet printer
Print technology	HP Thermal Inkjet
Dimensions (w x d x h)	574.5 x 409.5 x 186.3 mm
Weight	10.2 kg
Colour	Black
Print speed	Depends on the type of document
Processor	ARM946E-S , 96 MHz
Print quality	Black: Up to 1200 x 1200 rendered dpi Colour: Up to 4800 optimised dpi colour and 1200 input dpi
Media sizes supported	A3+ (330 × 482 mm), A3 (297 x 420 mm) A4 (210 x 297 mm), B4 (250 x 353 mm), B5 (176 x 250 mm), C6 (114 x 162 mm), 76 x 127 to 330 x 482 mm
Compatible Operating Systems	Windows® 2000, Windows® XP, Windows Vista™ Ready; Mac OS 10.3.9, Mac OS 10.4.6 or higher
Minimum System Requirements	Windows® XP: Pentium® II processor, 128 MB RAM, 200 MB hard disk space for XP; Windows Vista™: 800 MHz, 512 MB RAM, 200 MB hard disk space
Memory	32 MB
Printer languages	HP PCL 3 enhanced
Typefaces/fonts	15 built-in fonts
Duty cycle	Up to 5000 Pages per month
Media types	Paper (banner, inkjet, photo, plain), envelopes, labels, cards (greeting, index), transparencies, iron-on transfers
Maximum print area	290.8 x 403 mm
Print margins	A4: top: 1.7 mm, left: 3.2 mm, bottom: 1.7 mm Borderless printing: Yes (up to 330 x 482 mm)
Tray capacity	150 sheets
Duplex printing	Automatic
Power requirements	Input 100 to 240 VAC, 1300mA 50/60 Hz, Output 32 VDC, 1500mA
Power supply	Built-in universal power supply
Power consumption	60 watts maximum, 27.7 watts maximum (active/printing), 2.7 watts maximum (ready/sleep), 1 maximum watts(off)
Interface and connectivity	USB - compatible with USB 2.0 specifications, IEEE 1284-compliant parallel
Software included	HP Printer Software, HP Photosmart Essential Software, HP Smart Web Printing
Box content	HP Officejet K7100 Colour Printer, HP 339 Black Inkjet Print Cartridge, HP 344 Tri-colour Inkjet Print, starter CD with printer drivers, user documentation, power cable
Energy star	Yes
Warranty	Standard one-year limited hardware warranty

According to market research firms, Gartner and IDC, HP is the largest worldwide seller of personal computers, surpassing rival Dell. The HP DeskJet 6940 Colour Inkjet Printer is one of the latest Colour inkjet printers from HP which proves more beneficial for students and home-office users. The features of this printer are very interesting as it includes a built in Ethernet interface and HP’s Photo smart Premier suite. It is designed in such a way that it easily fits into the corner of any room. It allows your PC to relax as it does the job of printing your photos via dedicated USB port. This printer is a boon for students as well as small-office users as its affordable for them. When it comes to operating systems, they are very much compatible with both Windows and Mac.

Features:
Hewlett Packard DeskJet 6940 Printer comes with an effective control panel which includes a power button, a print-cancel button, a print-resume button and a printer-report button. The network connections and the decrease in the level of ink are depicted with the help of graphical LEDs. These printers are available in silver and black Colours.

Certain features of this network-enabled printers are remarkably good when compared to its previous versions. These include the standard Ethernet connector, USB connector which helps in printing photos from cameras or mobile phones. Two ink cartridges are available to account for the document printing and photo printing. The inks can be easily swapped.

Speed and Quality:

The HP DeskJet 6940 Printer has a very decent quality of printing as it can print black text at a rate of 6.97 pages per minute (ppm) and a 215×280mm (8.5×11-inch) photo at a rate of 0.6ppm. More waiting is not required here and which results in greater productivity. This printer is ideal for high volume of jobs as its high-capacity ink cartridges could save ink and money. The print quality is good enough to satisfy the students and home-office workers.

Warranty:

HP offers one-year limited hardware warranty backed by HP Customer Care, service and support; one-year technical phone support.

Pros:
Following are some of the merits of HP DeskJet 6940 Colour Inkjet Printer,

• Network enabled
• PC-free photo printing via PictBridge port
• Ethernet connector
• Compatible with both Windows and Mac PCs
• Decent print quality
• Affordable price
• Compactness and Robustness

Cons:
Following are some of the de-merits of HP DeskJet 6940 Colour Inkjet Printer,

• Switching of inks is required for swapping document and photo printing, which will consume time.
• Auto duplexer and large input tray might cost more.
• HP ink might also cost more.
• There is a possibility of graininess during photo print.

Verdict:

To summarise, HP DeskJet 6940 Colour Inkjet Printer is a robust and compact inkjet printer for document and photo printing. It is a good choice for home users and students as it comes with network capability, good print quality and genuine price.

HP DeskJet 6940 Printer - Technical Specifications, Features

Manufacturer	HP
Model Name	DeskJet 6940 Colour Inkjet Printer
Printer Type	Colour Inkjet printer
Dimensions	450×367x144mm
Weight	6kg
Black print speed	Up to 9.6 ppm
Colour print speed	Up to 5.8 ppm
Black print resolution	Up to 1200 x 1200 rendered dpi
Colour print resolution	Up to 4800 optimized dpi Colour and 1200 input dpi
Duplex printing	Optional two-sided print accessory (A4) and optional two-sided print accessory with small paper tray (10 x 15 cm)
Print technology implemented	HP Thermal Inkjet
Printer memory	32 MB
Processor	Celeron
Supported paper sizes	Sheets: Up to 150 (up to 400 with optional 250-sheet paper tray), Banners: Up to 20, Envelopes: Up to 20 Cards: Up to 30, Transparencies: Up to 30, Labels/A4 sheets: Up to 30
Duty cycle	5000 pages
Input tray capacity	Standard: 150-sheet input tray (fixed), optional: 150-sheet input tray, optional 250-sheet paper tray, optional HP Auto Two-sided Print Accessory with Small Paper Tray
Monthly duty cycle	Up to 5,000 pages per month
Networking	Print server - Integrated
Connections	USB and Ethernet
Supported operating systems	Windows® 98 SE, 2000 Professional, Me, XP Home, XP Professional; Mac OS X v 10.2.3, 10.3, 10.4
Print languages	HP PCL3 with HPA
EPA Energy Star Compliant	Yes
Warranty	1 year