HP Photosmart 8250

The HP Photosmart 8250 is basically an replacement of the HP Photosmart 8450 (yes the model numbers seem wrong, but they are right). They both have a 4800x1200 dpi resolution, the Vivera inks which are very long lasting, and is still very fast at printing due to a new print engine. HP no longer uses the old tricolor (red, green, blue) print cartridges, but now six individual ink tanks that are bought individually or in a complete set. This allows you to only replace colors that are truly out and not just replacing the whole thing just because the blue is out. This new system means that 4 x 6inch prints cost about 24 cents each. The 8250 is very fast when printing text documents
(even with the optional two-sided duplexing attachment; sold separately), but it's also very quick at printing color pictures as well.

Let's start off with the design. The Photosmart 8250 weighs almost 19 pounds, which is pretty heavy, and about 18 x 15 x 6 inches big. We found that the printer is quite big for most printer tables/stands, but not terrible. The paper hoppers on the 8250 include a 20-sheet 4x6 inch paper tray and a 100-sheet 8.5 x 11 inch paper holder.

Setting up the printer is a snap. Just install the HP software, connect the USB and power cables, and put the six color ink cartridges into the printer. The top of printer is where the LCD screen and buttons are. The color LCD screen is pretty high-quality and lets you print and see pictures without a computer by inserting your digital camera's memory card into the card slots on the printer.

What is probably the coolest thing about the printer is that if you choose to not use a computer to print photos, you can insert your camera's memory chip into the printer and have it print thumbnails of each photo on the card on only a few sheets of paper depending upon the amount of pictures on the card. Then you can take a pen and bubble in the circle next to the photo that you want printed and feed that sheet back into the printer and it will scan the sheet for the bubbled-in photos that you want and it will print them for you in the format that you selected. So it's kind of like a voting machine where you fill in what person you want to vote for, or in this case, which photos you want printed.

Standalone printing is also the only way to access the printer's panorama feature, which allows creating very long landscape photos measuring as big as 8.5 x 24 inches. Besides printing from a computer, the 8250 also supports PictBridge-compatible digital cameras or your choice of CompactFlash I/II, SD/MMC, SmartMedia, Memory Stick, and xD-Picture cards. With the optional HP bt300 Bluetooth wireless printer adapter, you can print from camera phones, PDAs, and other Bluetooth-enabled gadgets. A big 2.5-inch LCD along with built-in preview and editing tools let you crop, zoom, brighten inky shadows, banish demon red-eyes, or print frames from video clips.

The HP Photosmart 8250 uses a new method for printing pictures. It routes ink from the
cartridges to a reservoir, which is what many high-end professional printers do. The new system, unlike conventional drop-on-demand technology, allows the printer to recycle excess ink, including the ink wasted during head cleaning and alignment. It also reduces delays that are caused by pumping ink into the printhead between print jobs. As a result, the 8250 can more accurately
gauge how much ink it needs to print whatever you are printing. One claimed advantage of this system is increased page yield from a given ink tank over previous and competing models. Based on HP's rated number of prints per cartridge, the ink cost of a 4 x 6 should run you about 23 cents and we estimate that a 8.5 x 10 would run about 80 cents.

The Photosmart 8250's performance is good. Some photo prints did have a grainy look to them without looking through any magnification, so we were a little disappointed with that. It was
mostly noticeable in areas of uniform color, such as the blue of a sky or yellow of a school bus. Text printing was fairly good too. Some diagonal lines were present in text printouts, but they were not too bad. The color matching between the image and printed photo were almost flawless. Flesh and shadows were very detailed and almost perfect.

Pros: Fast printing, very nice standalone printing options, lots of connectivity options
Cons: Some grainy photos, lines on text, big and heavy body
Editors' Rating:

buy it here- HP Photosmart 8250

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