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Fast, high-quality colour and a touch screen to control it
HP produces printers in such a wide range of shapes and sizes, it's sometimes difficult to recognise them as the company's products.
The Photosmart D7360 is coloured in white and two-tone grey, with a heavy curve at the front. The control panel sports a larger than usual, 8.6cm display which is touch-sensitive, so some of the controls are given over to on-screen buttons.
There are two, integrated trays at the front of the printer, the first for A4 paper and the second for photo blanks, at up to 10 x 15cm. Both can be filled at the same time and the D7360 cleverly takes in the photo tray when you select that media, and slides it back out again at the end of the job.
A full set of memory card slots is provided, with the exception of Smartmedia, which is near obsolete. There's a Pictbridge socket at the bottom of the front panel, too, so a camera can be connected directly.
HP uses permanent print heads in the Photosmart D7360, with the Vivera ink cartridges plugging in at the front and ink being re-circulated to the heads and back again, keeping wastage to a minimum.
Interestingly, only the light cyan and light magenta ink cartridges have the same amount of ink in them. The black and yellow cartridges hold more and the others less.
HP says this is based on typical usage of the different colours of ink, to try and balance them out so they all run out together. This does mean you can take advantage of a cheaper ink six-pack, but generally, having more ink in each cartridge would be preferable.
This imbalance in the cartridge fill levels makes it very difficult to calculate overall page costs, but we estimate them to be around 1p for a black A4 page and 25p for a colour one. On these assumptions, this makes the printer economical to run.
Print quality is excellent, but it’s best if you use HP's new Advanced Photo paper, which is absorbent and produces almost instant-dry prints. The older, Premium Plus paper produces prints which are tacky to the touch and need more prolonged drying.
Overall, the HP Photosmart D7360 is a high-quality printer, as long as you use it with the right consumables.
Also consider
Canon Pixma IP6700D
A competent printer that's great value
Epson Stylus Photo R360
More cost effective than the HP Photosmart D7360, but with fewer features and
lower performance
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HP Photosmart D7360
The first one arrived, oddly it was cheaper direct from hp than anywhere else on the internet at £99. It arrived next day. The touch screen was obviously faulty from startup but it took 30 mins of annoying and expensive helpline call before the operator - whom I could hardly understand because of thick Asian accent - told me, er, "The screen is faulty". Then another set of helpline calls eventually brought a replacement printer within 5 days but the courier refused to take away the faulty one which still sits here. So far it seems OK but it has no Windows Vista software to run it and the download of it from hp was a complete pain. I'm impressed by its ink efficiency, print quality is good, and direct-print from photo media cards is a great facility. Set-up instructions are confusing because it gets two steps the wrong way round so you don't load the ink cartidges at the time you should and you then have to wait for a screen message after 4 minutes of clunking before you find out! They need to sort out their phone support, their left hand doesn't know what their right is doing. One person gives you a promised action, then you are transferred to another who contradicts it, etc. etc.
Posted by Steve Riches, 27 Mar 2007