HP Photosmart 1218

Hewlwtt Packard's Photosmart 1218 certainly has a lot to offer and doesn't even need a PC connection to be put to good use. It sports an infrared port, a Type II Compact Flash (CF) slot and a SmartMedia slot. More attractive than most, the 1218 is housed in a sleek curved black chassis. Lifting the lid puts the head to the centre of the chassis for easy cartridge swapping. Connection is by means of parallel or USB cable.

HP doesn't usually make what it would call dedicated photo printers. Instead it prefers to talk about its photo enhancement technology, PhotoREt III, which lays up to 29 drops of ink on a single spot on the page to produce any one of around 3500 shades of colour. This saves the printer having to work on printing the very small dots needed to achieve the same result through half-toning. But, if you're a traditionalist and resolution says more than technology, you'll be pleased to hear that when printing on photo paper it switches to a 2400dpi mode. It needs no user intervention to do this - it scans the paper, detects what kind it is, and makes the necessary adjustments.

The driver is up to the usual high standard we have come to expect from HP, with the common three print quality settings supplemented by a plethora of additional options. The number of paper types stretches to 27, including iron-on transfers, Hagaki and greetings cards, each split into logical subsections for easy navigation, and in a choice of 19 sizes.

Printing up to four pages per sheet helps you cut down on waste for proofs or archiving, and poster printing will stretch your output to cover up to 16 sheets (4 x 4) for hanging on the wall. If your images don't come out quite the way you'd have liked, you can tweak the saturation, brightness and colour tone on-screen, as well as increase the volume of ink laid down or up the drying time to avoid smudging.

A two-line digital panel and a series of buttons dominate the front of the unit. These are used to control the direct printing of photos from the Compact Flash and SmartMedia slots. When the Photosmart is connected to a PC, these cards appear in My Computer as removable drives, so the printer can double as a card reader which, depending on your connection, could make this a quicker way to download snaps than the conventional software and cable. Printing this way is pretty much instantaneous. As soon as we selected our images and specified the printing size, it was off.

There are six size options, spanning 2.5 x 3.25in to 8 x 10in. A section of the paper tray is devoted to holding postcard-sized sheets of photo paper, so you can try and fool your friends into thinking you've had your pics professionally developed.

Our standard A4 test photo was well rendered at high quality on photo paper in a respectable seven minutes eight seconds, with perhaps the most realistic skin tones we have ever seen. Tonal transitions were smooth and unstepped, and there was no evidence of banding or bleeding between dark and light areas. We would not have thought twice about putting the results on the wall. Vector graphics were adequate, although slightly grainy on inkjet paper, and the colours produced were not as vivid as those from some of the entrants in our last inkjet group test. That said, it did complete the A4 image in just four minutes 12 seconds.

Standard black text on photocopy paper was also well rendered, with sharp edges and no evidence of feathering. However, our test document included a number of hyperlinks that Word had turned blue, and the ink used to print these bled into the page, softening the characters with a hazy cyan halo. This is disappointing since HP has traditionally been top dog when it comes to textual output. The last sheet of a 95-page document of black text and greyscale images dropped into the output tray 24 minutes 42 seconds after we hit Print - a rate of almost four pages a minute, which is truly impressive.

Drivers aside, the bundled software runs to ArcSoft PhotoImpression and PhotoMontage, both of which will appeal far more to the home than business user, and once the novelty of PhotoMontage has worn off you'll probably not look at it again. On a more positive note, though, use it at a high enough resolution and with the poster printing option ticked and you'll see some impressive results.

Under the hood there's 16Mb of Ram and eight built-in fonts, but HP has only included light-user cartridges - you get only 21ml of black ink rather than the full 42ml of the standard cartridge, but you do get a duplexing unit as standard. The infrared port allows you to print directly from notebooks, Wap phones or suitably equipped PDAs and cameras, and with easy networking, a 5000-page a month duty cycle and HP PCL Level 3 this printer should appeal to home and business users alike.

CONTACT
Hewlett Packard 0990 474747
www.hp.com