HP Photosmart 7350

With a sporty sloped face, the Photosmart 7350 stands out from the inkjet printer crowd.

It is a two-cartridge model that uses four or six colours, depending on whether you use the black or photo (black, light cyan, light magenta) cartridge along with the tri-colour well.

At only 17ml each the colour refills are tiny, and after printing our first 50 pages the driver was showing the black well to be half empty, so at £20 per cartridge (£30 for colour), prints are expensive.

With slots for Compact Flash (CF) II, Secure Digital (SD), Memory Stick and Smartmedia, the printer can handle pretty much any media you throw at it, and Windows will recognise any filled slots as drives.

Connection is by USB cable, and there is a second USB port to the front. Unfortunately this is a full-size B-type (square) socket so you can't use the 7350 as an accessible one-port hub.

Printing from media cards is not as well implemented as on Epson's Stylus Photo 895. This has a small graphical screen so you can choose the picture you want to print without producing a contact sheet first. The 7350, on the other hand, displays just two lines of text.

On a brighter note, it behaved impeccably when we tried to fool it by rebooting the PC while it was printing from a CF card. As we hoped, it ignored the system reset and continued printing until the job was complete.

Impressively the driver understands 25 paper sizes and, although paper type can be specified, a sensor in the 7350 saves you the bother. The first time we loaded the input tray, though, the printer warned us we were out of paper. We found the only way to resolve this was to take half the pages away.

This is confusing and a shame as, until this point, we had marvelled at how well suited this model was to the less experienced user.

While not slow, the 7350 is unlikely to set any records. We tested it against the similarly targeted Epson Stylus Photo 950, which does not have the benefit of media slots.

The 7350's driver, marked up as 'final beta', seemed slow to spool pages, taking a full 56 seconds to think about our 50-page mixed content file before setting the print head in motion.

Once running, it completed this test in 15 minutes, 52 seconds. The Photo 950, however, took less than half that time, completing it in seven minutes, 54 seconds.

Likewise, while the Photosmart 7350 needed 37 minutes 22 seconds to present us with our 50-page pdf document, the Photo 950 took just eight minutes, four seconds.

Output was fairly clean, but when printing text documents on photocopy paper small characters were hazy. In each test, we used the standard black cartridge but, while we found this produced a firm tone, the tri-colour photo cartridge produced sharper edges, albeit in a less convincing colour.

For years, HP has been expounding the benefits of Photoret (Photo Resolution Enhancement Technology) over and above high resolutions, but has nonetheless implemented a 4,800 x 1,200 resolution for use with photo paper.

Photoret works by laying down multiple small drops of ink on a single spot. In the latest version, Photoret IV, this is 32 drops. As a result, it can blend more accurate colours when outputting photos, while at the same time reducing the required image resolution.

We switched to the photo cartridge and photo paper to print our A4 photo and were impressed. Colours were realistic and skin tones convincing.

There was no evidence of banding and, even in burnt-out areas, such as an almost-white section of surf, there remained considerable detail. Colours, particularly skies, were slightly warmer than those produced by HP's competitors.

Where the 7350 plodded through the job in six minutes 11 seconds, though, the Photo 950 raced through in two minutes, 11 seconds. The choice then, is speed or price. The 7350 may be slower than the competition, but it is cheaper.

SPECS

• Thermal inkjet technology
• 4,800 x 1,200 max resolution
• USB connection
• Five colour plus black ink
• Automatic paper type sensor
• Manufacturers' stated cartridge life: black, 450 pages at five per cent coverage; colour, 400pp at 15 per cent coverage; photo, 125 photos at 10 x 15cm at 15 per cent coverage
• OS support: Windows 98, ME, 2000 Professional, XP, Mac OS 9/X 10.1

Price: £199 (£169.36 ex VAT)

Contact: HP 08705 474 747
www.hp.com/uk