HP Photosmart 8050 review

The photosmart 8050 is one of HP's latest photo printers and rather than four inks, it uses six - the extra two providing a greater range of shade and subtlety.

Like most six-ink printers, the 8050 requires you to swap the black cartridge for a special photo-colour cartridge when you want to print some photos. Unlike most of its competitors, however, the 8050 actually comes supplied with the optional photo-cartridge. This meant that we were able to print photos straight from the word go.

With its standard black cartridge installed, the 8050 printed our text document at an impressive 19.9 pages per minute (ppm) - the fastest time we've seen. Quality was good too, the text was crisp and clean, not blotchy or grey when it should have been solid black, and there was no bleeding of ink into the paper. Even at draft quality, you'd be able to get away printing business letters or CVs.

The HP took just over 16 minutes to print our test photos; again a good time - we've seen some printers labour for well over half an hour on the same job. We had some reservations about the quality of the photo prints, though. The pictures were slightly grainy, which isn't something we'd expect from a printer designed to print photos. The problem was particularly pronounced when we printed directly from our digital camera's memory card. Many of the prints had also been marked by the inkjet's paper-feed rollers. This kind of thing isn't uncommon, but the marks usually fade after an hour or two - in this case they did not. Some of our pictures also had odd-looking proportions or had been cropped in unusual ways. This is because the Photosmart tries to print true borderless prints, unlike many other printers which simply leave a white border around their prints. Unfortunately, the 8050 doesn't always get borderless printing right.

The 8050's screen is a little on the small side, but its direct menu system is easy to use. The printer has a built-in card reader that accepts all common types of memory card, for instance xD and SD, CompactFlash and so on. There's also a PictBridge port for printing from PictBridge-compatible cameras.