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HP Photosmart Pro B8850 review

Verdict:

Review Date: 27 Jun 2008

Price when reviewed: £377

Supplier: http://www.lambda-tek.com/componentshop

Our Rating 4 stars out of 5

User Rating 3 stars out of 5

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HP's Photosmart Pro B8850 is a professional-quality A3 photo and fine art printer, and is priced accordingly.

It takes a while to set up. After loading eight ink cartridges and four print heads, you must wait 40 minutes as the printer fills its ink reservoirs and calibrates itself.

It takes eight ink cartridges, including matt and photographic black and light shades of grey, magenta and cyan. The cartridges are expensive, as are the print costs, with a mixed-colour A4 document costing 10.7p, which is comfortably the highest in the group.

The light-grey ink cartridge gave outstanding results in black-and-white photos and accurate grey tones in colour photos. If you select the greyscale-only option, the printer uses the light-grey cartridge instead of combining colours to produce grey. Photos were beautifully coloured. The B8850 uses pigmented inks, but it doesn't have a gloss cartridge. Colour photo prints were vivid, with more intense colours than those made by the R1900. Photos were less glossy, but the level of detail was outstanding.

The B8850 is not designed for plain document printing. Normal-quality mono text on 80gsm A4 looked blurry, although thinner draft-quality lettering was legible. Although its mixed-colour document costs are high, the B8850 is economical to use for its intended purpose. A 6x4in print cost 25.4p and an A3 print costs about £1.37.

This is an excellent printer, but we had problems with our review sample. The sheet feed failed to work correctly. It loaded paper but didn't register its presence once loaded. We couldn't test the printer's performance on canvas and fine art papers. This problem has been reported online by other users. HP states that it may be due to damage sustained in transit and should replace faulty units.

The B8850 produced the finest level of detail of any printer here and had gorgeous colour. The addition of grey ink makes it ideal for black-and-white prints. Our only reservation are the technical problems we encountered.

Author: Ben Pitt

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User Reviews

Independent customer reviews from

HP Q7161A#BEH scored:
6.7 out of 10

The 2 most helpful reviews based on 2 reviews:

Confirmed purchaser

2
Good Points
Reviewer left no comment
Bad Points
Not compatible with adobe software. thinks it is printing from 'letter' format from InDesign CS3 when document set to 'A4' format. Borderless from InDesign impossible to print. Have to print with borders. Maybe does not like Windows Vista. Or maybe does not like the latest updates on Adobe. In any case, paper size a real problem.
Confirmed purchase on 08 Sep 2008

Mike, Tunbridge Wells

9
Good Points
Not a lot of use so far but seems impressive to date. Easy to set up. Excellent print quality. No regrets over purchase
Bad Points
No photo card slot and no network connection. Heavy and big, but there again it is an A3 plus printer.
Confirmed purchase on 28 Jan 2009
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