HP Photosmart 7960

There are plenty of specialised printers available these days, but HP's new Photosmart 7960 takes photo printing to an entirely new level.

Most photo printers use six different coloured inks - cyan, magenta, yellow and black, plus additional lighter shades of cyan and magenta - that help to produce skin tones and other subtle colours. In addition to this six-colour mode, selecting the highest quality printing mode introduces an extra ink cartridge that contains light and dark grey inks and a special high-quality black ink formulated specifically for photo printing. This allows the printer to reproduce really high-quality colour prints.

You can also use the grey/black cartridge independently to produce excellent black-and-white prints that work well for portrait photography. Finally, you also have the option to work with the standard four colours used by ordinary inkjet printers (cyan, magenta, yellow and black) to produce ordinary text and graphics documents that don't need high-quality printing.

The Photosmart's photo printing is very impressive and comes close to the quality you'd get from prints ordered from a photo lab. The printer doesn't stop there, though. It's absolutely crammed with additional features and you don't even need to connect it to your computer. It's got a variety of slots that allow you to insert all the main types of memory card. This allows you to print pictures directly from your digital camera without having to first transfer the pictures onto your computer.

A screen on the front of the printer allows you to preview your pictures and to select options such as red-eye removal or printing an index page that displays thumbnail previews of your pictures. There's also a clever feature called Video Action that allows you to print a series of frames from a video clip in the form of a storyboard.

It's not the cheapest inkjet printer available, but its impressive range of features and outstanding photo quality make the Photosmart 7960 ideal for the keen photographer.

Contact: HP 0870 547 4747
www.hp.co.uk