HP Photosmart 6510
HP has an enviable reputation for photo printing and this all-in-one sits roughly mid-way in its range. It includes a separate photo tray and an 89mm touchscreen, though it doesn’t have a front panel USB port. Most of these printers can print photos from Android and iOS phones and tablets, but the HP machines have ePrint too, for remote printing, when you’re away from home.
HP claims speeds of 11.0ppm and 7.5ppm and I saw 8.9ppm and 3.9ppm, which is not bad. Photo prints are highly detailed and with strong, natural colours. Page costs, at 2.5p for black and 7.7p for colour, are mid-range.
Reg Rating 85%
Price £90
More info HP
HP Envy 110
This is unlike any of the other all-in-ones here. It’s designed more like a Blu-ray player than a printer, with a very low profile and a powered 89mm touchscreen which swings in and out to make room for pages to feed out. The design choice also means the printer has a slim feed tray, taking only 80 sheets, and is fiddly to get your fingers to.
Print speed also suffers a bit, in comparison with the Photosmart 6510, at 6.0ppm and 2.3ppm for black and colour. The machine uses one black and one tri-colour cartridge, which can be wasteful and black page print costs are the highest in the group, at 3.8p.
Reg Rating 65%
Price £150
More info HP
Next page: Kodak ESP 3.2
COMMENTS
differences
The differences are explained right at the start of the article. A photo printer generally has more than 4 inks, some offer CD/DVD printing and some have negative/slide scanners.
The truth of all this though is that printing photos at home is a waste of time and money. Online photo printing services can have the pictures out to you next day and they'll be better quality and cheaper than you can possibly achieve at home.
When my current printer dies or the ink becomes hard to find I'll be getting myself a laser, probably black and white, and all my photo printing will be done online.
Would have liked to have seen some 'normal' inkjet all-in-ones as a comparison
Apart from the fancy pop-up LCD displays (are they needed when you've probably previewed the pic on a phone/camera/tablet/desktop already?), what's the difference between an colour inkjet photo printer and a "normal" colour inkjet printer?
It might have been nice to incude a few "non-photo" colour inkjets in the review, load them up with photo paper and see what sort of job they do. With the price of photo paper and inkjet cartridges already very high, I've got to question spending anything more than 100 quid on any sort of inkjet printer.
Me? I've got an HP colour all-in-one inkjet printer, but no somewhat pointless colour pop-up LCD on it. Price? 25 quid directly from hp.com - throw in some photo paper and it does a good enough job at printing photos. No printer here costs under 80 quid, the difference of which could go on buying a reasonable number of cartridges and photo paper.
Re: When is £300>£499?
If you're price conscious (as you should be), then you'd be crazy to compare prices of the printers themselves and not spend at least twice the time comparing the cost of the ink. If you actually use a printer, the cost of the ink will swamp out the price of the printer itself several times over.
Printing your own is only way
Being a photographer who likes to post process a lot I sometimes have weird crops etc. I like to control how these are printed and how accurate they are in colour saturation and hue etc. Most print services don't offer much more than size and borderless or matt or glossy.
Re: Printing on glass
Some local options here:
http://www.acrylic-glass-photo.co.uk/en/acrylic-glass-photo/241000.xhtml
http://uk.whitewall.com/products/LumasecLight
http://www.pixum.co.uk/poster-canvas/gallery-print.html
http://www.posterjack.co.uk/
