HP Photosmart D7160 review

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Verdict:

We gave the D7160 five stars when we reviewed it in What's New, Shopper January 2007, but the competition has come on a lot since. It has consistently good print quality. Photo printing is good, but not outstanding, and the speed of its normal-quality document printing is only half that of Canon's less expensive PIXMA iP4300. Its draft print quality is outstanding and is easily good enough for everyday printing. It is easy to use and install, but its print costs are among the highest in the group, so it falls just short of the full five stars.

Review Date: 10 Oct 2007

Price when reviewed: inc VAT

Reviewed By: Kat Orphanides

Our Rating 4 stars out of 5

Review
Specs

HP's Photosmart D7160 is the only printer here with a full range of readers for a variety of memory cards as well as a PictBridge port.

It has a 2in colour screen and a simple interface which allows you to select, preview, and print images directly from the memory cards. Its PictBridge port lets you print photos directly from a digital camera with PictBridge support.

It looks good and feels well made. The paper tray is easy to load with A4 sheets and 6x4in photographic paper, and you can have both loaded at the same time. The D7160 uses HP's six-colour Vivera ink system, but the quality of its photo printing wasn't up to that of Epson's six-colour Stylus Photo R285.

It is a good photo printer, producing images with rich, deep blacks and realistic flesh tones. There's no visible graininess, and the colours on most of our prints were bright and lifelike. We noticed a slight blue tint, which wasn't enough to affect the reproduction of skin tones, but made images with a lot of grey and brown tones look murky.

The D7160's draft text print speed was fast in our tests, and text was fairly dark and easy to read, though a few letters looked slightly jagged on close examination. The lettering on normal-quality text prints was dark and clearly defined, though its print speed wasn't particularly fast. It had one of the fastest mixed colour print speeds in the group, with generally good print quality, although large blocks of black colour looked faded.

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