HP Photosmart D7460 review

The Photosmart D7460 is the latest A4 photo printer from HP.

While performance and print quality are largely unchanged from previous models, it has a few extra features to tempt potential buyers. A 3.5in touchscreen makes it simple to print directly from a USB flash drive or memory card, and the integrated memory card reader supports a variety of popular digital camera media formats. There's also the option of printing directly from any camera that supports PictBridge.

When you first switch on the D7460, an onscreen guide takes you through loading ink and paper before performing an automatic print head alignment. Impressively, you can connect the device to your PC via USB, Ethernet, Bluetooth or wirelessly using 802.11g. Unlike most printers capable of connecting wirelessly, the D7460 doesn't have to be connected to your PC via USB during the configuration process. Instead, its settings menu includes a wireless setup wizard that scans for routers and allows you to choose your connection and enter your passphrase using an onscreen keyboard.

An alternative wireless printing option is Bluetooth. The printer comes with a USB Bluetooth dongle that you can plug into your PC and use to communicate with the D7460.

Print quality was excellent across the board. Draft-quality text was easily good enough to use for everyday tasks, and our test document was printed at an incredible 19.7ppm. The only disadvantage was the loud printing noise in this mode. Our mono text documents were flawless at normal quality, but the print speed of 5.4ppm was rather slow compared to other inkjets of comparable quality, such as Canon's PIXMA iP4300. Colour print speeds were about average, and we were generally pleased with the sharp, accurate quality of both text and images, although images that used a lot of black came out a shade too pale.

The D7460 bills itself as a photo printer, and its print quality reflects this. It uses six inks, including light cyan and light magenta, to help create precise colour and shading in its photo prints. A separate photo paper tray is automatically drawn into the printer when you select an appropriate paper size, and is capable of holding up to 7x5in photo paper.

Photo prints had none of the minor problems suffered by our colour documents. Black tones were intense, and we were pleased with the accuracy of skin tones and the smooth shading on natural objects such as fruit, flowers and foliage.

We tried a couple of HP's different own brand photo papers to see which produced the best results and found that Premium Plus paper gave by far the most accurate colour reproduction, as well as excellent detail. However, we found that our 10x8in prints on this photo paper took a couple of minutes longer than our photo prints made speed tests on HP's Advanced Glossy paper.

Mono print costs are a very economical 0.9p per A4 page if you buy high-yield ink cartridges, but colour printing is more expensive at 6.6p per colour page. A mixed colour and black page adds up to 7.5p. The light cyan and light magenta colours aren't taken into account for these figures as they're only used for photo printing, for which HP hasn't released print costs yet.

With four different ways of connecting to your PC and the ability to edit photos directly from the touchscreen, the Photosmart D7460 is one of the most feature-packed inkjets we've ever reviewed. It's expensive and lacks the scanner of an MFP, though, plus it can't print onto CDs or DVDs and doesn't have a duplex unit. However, if you're desperate to have wireless networking, the D7460 is the best photo printer we've seen.