HP Photosmart A826 review

HP's Photosmart A826 home photo centre is bulky, but has some unique features.

It's the only printer here to print 7x5in photos. Although it's an inkjet rather than a dye-sub printer, even large photos showed virtually no trace of graininess. 6x4in print costs are fairly low, with a £21 photo value pack producing 120 prints at 17.5p each. The 7x5in HP 343 packs produce 60 prints at a print cost of 30.2p per photo.

The A826's 7in touch screen is the largest here and is ideal for viewing and printing images directly from a memory card. As well as the usual cropping, brightness adjustment and red-eye removal features, you can add drawings and enter your own captions onscreen.

The A826 was easy to use thanks to animated onscreen instructions showing you how to perform tasks such as loading ink and paper. The paper tray is conveniently concealed at the back of the printer, but felt flimsy and was prone to sticking. Driver installation was also simple, if slow. The maximum resolution of 4,800x1,200dpi is available only when you print directly from a PC, with direct printing limited to 1,200x1,200dpi. Luckily, the lower- resolution photos still looked good, and direct printing often gave us more accurate cropping and positioning of our images on the page. Printing is slow, though, taking 18 minutes and 15 seconds to print six 6x4in photos and over 19 minutes for six 7x5in photos.

Photos looked almost identical to those printed by HP's Photosmart A526. Colours looked bright and attravailable, although some skin tones looked slightly yellow in side-by-side comparisons with prints from the other printers.

HP's Photosmart A826 is fun to use, and a great choice if your family prints a lot of photos straight from a memory card. The ability to print 7x5in photos is also a bonus. Its image quality is no better than Epson's PictureMate 240, though, so unless you want to print large photos you should buy the cheaper printer.