HP Photosmart A636 review

HP's innovative Photosmart A636 is designed to be used either on its own or with your PC.

Instead of coming with a driver disc, the printer appears as a virtual CD-ROM drive when you connect it to a PC's USB port, and a wizard installs the drivers for you. It's a brilliant move, and makes it easy to connect this very portable printer to friends' and colleagues' Windows PCs without any fuss.

The A636 eliminates many of the problems we're used to seeing with compact photo printers. Its print speeds and maximum resolution of 4800x1200dpi are the same regardless of whether you're using it from a PC or printing photos directly from its memory card slots. A reasonably large 3.5 inch touchscreen makes it easy to preview and edit your photos, and there are even some fun built-in editing tools that allow you to add custom captions, borders, tints and artistic effects, as well as tools for cropping images to fit on photo paper.

It's not a particularly fast printer. We had to wait almost a minute and a half for a single 6x4 inch photo at Best quality - but it was worth the wait. Our pictures looked outstanding, with smooth shading, sharp detail and vivid colours. Dark tones were rich and deep, even though the A636 only uses three ink colours and combines them to create black. Skin tones, pale shades and earthy colours looked natural. Some bright shades were more intense than they ought to have been, but this flattered the pictures and made them more eye-catching, which will rarely offend.

Buying paper and ink cartridges together gets you the lowest print costs. HP's 120 sheet Q8700AE Value Pack typically costs £20, which works out at 16.6p per 6x4 inch photo. That's not bad, and if you shop around you may find the pack for as little as £6.50. For 7x5 inch prints you have to buy HP's 110 ink pack (CB304AE) and 7x5 inch photo paper (Q8696A) separately.