HP Photosmart 8250 review

HP claims that the Photosmart 8250 is the world's fastest photo printer.

It's the first HP consumer inkjet to use an individual ink tank for each of its six colours, rather than the typical HP supplies that combine three colours into a single cartridge.

Instead of using on-cartridge print heads, the 8250's tanks supply ink through capillaries to a permanent head. This has 3,900 nozzles and a comparatively large area, so it can lay down plenty of ink with each pass. Although the Photosmart 8250 is a departure for HP, the company says it doesn't represent a general change of direction for its inkjet devices.

HP says the 8250 can print a 6x4" photo in as little as 14 seconds, but we couldn't match this speed in our tests. At its top-quality setting, the 8250 completed our six borderless 6x4" photos in 11 minutes and 35 seconds, which is very fast for an inkjet. By lowering the print quality to Fast Draft we reduced the printing time to a little over four minutes: faster even than affordable dye-sublimation printers.

Even at this setting, the 8250's output was free from banding and excessive grain. Photos printed at top quality were generally excellent, but several test images suffered from a very subtle speckled band at one edge. Prints made directly from a memory card had highly saturated colours, but these generally enhanced the subject without becoming garish.

The printer's configuration means there's no need to swap cartridges to get decent results on plain paper. The 8250 printed our draft text test at over 18.5 pages per minute (ppm), and reached 2.4ppm on our mixed-colour test. Print quality was consistently very high, with crisp black text and solid-looking colours, but the printer's output tray needs a more substantial lip to prevent paper spillage during high-speed printing.

The Photosmart 8250 has plenty of useful photo printing features, such as a range of memory card slots, two paper trays and a preview screen. Although we couldn't match HP's speed claims, the 8250 was still among the fastest inkjets we've seen. With low running costs of around 2.3p per mono page and 5.5p in colour, this is an excellent all-rounder.