In this age of tiny goods, where smaller inevitably means more expensive, it is hard to view a large and clunky printer with much appreciation. But ultimately your interest should of course lie with the features it can provide you rather than its design ethic.

While style-gurus may baulk at the HP 8450's bulk - it is certainly one of the bigger A4 inkjet printers around - there's no denying that this flagship model is a great printer.

As the name suggests, it is designed for photo prints, and it will print borderless pages up to A4 in size, while it will also work as a standard inkjet for text, presentations and anything else you might care to throw at it. The maximum resolution is 4800 x 1200dpi, while for mono prints the standard resolution is a still-sharp 1200 x 1200dpi.

The printer took 98 seconds to print our test sample of 10 pages of black text, giving it a rate of 7.5 pages per minute, although it took 26 seconds to put the first page together. A colour photo took one minute to print at 600dpi on standard paper. However, when switched to the best quality mode, and with photo paper, it took around eight minutes to print our test image.

The quality of the 8450's colour prints is stunning, with sharp detail and vibrant colours all round. Even at one quality setting down from 'best', the results were still excellent, and prints took roughly half the time.

As for the black text sample prints, while they are not as good as the results you might get from a similarly priced laser printer, they are still very good - about as good as you can expect to get from an inkjet, in fact.

The text was readable down to a size of four points (one 18th of an inch). Use a good quality colour image, however, and suitable photo paper, and the results are pretty much indistinguishable from a shop-printed image. On plain paper, things were duller and less sharp (and the plain paper tends to crinkle because of all the wet ink) but it still gives fairly decent results.

You'll find you can even operate the 8450 without a computer; it reads memory cards (CompactFlash, Memory Stick, MMC and SD cards) and has a USB port to plug in a PictBridge-compatible digital camera, which enables you to print direct. If you are doing this, however, beware that the results will be of a lower quality than those you could expect from printing from a PC.

Overall, the 8450 is big and bulky and it costs a lot, but it's the best inkjet photo printer we have seen to date, and you might well save money in the long term by using it instead of a high-street photo shop. If you are a keen digital photographer and like to have prints of your images, this is the printer to consider.

Contact:
HP 08705 474747
www.hp.com/uk

Also consider:
Lexmark P915