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HP PhotoSmart 8450 Inkjet Printer | List Price: $279.50
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Brand: Hewlett-Packard
Binding: Electronics
Warranty: 1 year warranty
Features: - Up to 4,800 x 1,200 optimized dpi color, 1,200 x 1,200 black, or 8-ink color
- Up to 20 ppm black and color speed, 4-by-6 photo as fast as 27 seconds
- 2.5-inch LCD to rotate, crop, zoom, and remove red-eye before printing
- Frame-by-frame video printing; slots for digital-camera memory cards
- USB, Ethernet, and PictBridge interfaces; PC and Mac compatible
Great photos BUT ... [Posted on 2006-09-18]
Yes, it has excellent quality photos - worth the slow printing to get - not really all that slow. BUT . . . I have had to re-install the software several times in the year or so that I have owned it - fickle. AND now, without warning, the printer now needs repair - no abuse to it, no special printing - just one day decided to malfunction. HP on-line technician says it is internal hardware problem and I will have to pay to get it fixed. HA! costs more to repair than replace, but reliability on this hasn't been all that great in my HP experiences with several printers. Troubleshooting guides not that great, doesn't go into a lot of the problems. Got a paper jam? Yeah, that's covered in the troubleshooting. But receive a special error code on the LCD display? Nah, can't let the customer know what that code means...So, if you can buy this CHEAP, then it's worth it for the quality of the photo printing, but plan for it to have a short life.
Starry Eyed Over This One, But Lets Me Down [Posted on 2006-10-01]
Upon the joyful news that we were having a girl, my husband decided to invest in a new digital camera and a photo printer. The digital camera still works great--the printer is another matter. While this one prints beautiful pictures, the cost of ink far outweighs the beauty of them sometimes.
As we all know, this is how printer companies make their money, through the ink. Replacing every cartridge at once will run you about $75 at a time, give or take a few. The gray ink is used up the quickest, and has also been one of the hardest for us to find here locally. The main problem I have with this printer is that the quality is excellent after you replace the ink, but for only about the first 50-70 pictures. After that. The pictures take on too much of a magenta cast and start to get out of register--very frustrating when you're printing out any pictures, let alone ones of your child. Yes, we do what the manual sugests for such occasions, and the main one is to clean the printer cartridge heads, but this has only actually worked for us on one occassion. Every other time get us no results and we are still stuck with pictures that resemble something a third grader took a crayon to. In the long run, I will not be buying a photo printer for home use, but will rather take them to a store for processing.
Quality-wise, it gets you in the beginning, but doesn't hold out for the long run. We have fiddled with it for two years. Enough's enough.
Excellent but not perfect [Posted on 2006-11-28]
We have had this printer for over 20 months now and I figured that it was enough time to test it before writing about it :)
When I originally went to buy a photo printer the CompUSA store that I was in had an HP Rep there for the Christmas to answer questions about their product lines. Being that I have worked on and with computers for many years we had a pretty good no-BS discussion. Eventually I asked him what printer he would buy if he had his choice and was going to use it for his personal or family use. This was the one he selected. It was a little more expensive than some of the others, but not the most expensive photo printer that was on the shelf. So we talked a bit more and I decided to go with it.
It should be noted that we generally use HP premium paper and HP photo paper for our printing. After testing other brands I can testify that if you want to get the best out of this printer then go with the HP paper. It is a little more expensive but the quality of your printout shows when you need it most.
When printing small pics on 4x6 sized photo paper you cannot tell the difference from what you get at a local Wal Mart (or whatever). If you print a lot of black and white pictures this thing does them beautifully. Large color photos are also excellent but as some reviews have noted that there is a slight curling sometimes near the edges on no-border printing (that prints all the way to the edge of the page). However, this is not a show-stopper.
Speedwise it's not even close to what you can get today. However, if you aren't in a business environment then it shouldn't matter. I would NOT use this in a high-output environment even though the quality is excellent.
The inks are not cheap, and if you like to print out every piece of [...] that catches your fancy then you will be pretty unhappy due to having to replace the ink cartridges. If you want to print photos then you can change your "text" black ink for the photo gray ink. What this means is that you can take out the black cartridge and snap in the photo gray.
While this is not hard, you don't want to make the mistake of always leaving the photo gray cartidge in for all print jobs - it's for photos. You don't want to waste it just printing text. It's better (and cheaper)to use the black cartridge for text. If you leave it in then you will notice that the printer will go through it pretty quickly. It will be empty and the other print cartridges will still be about 1/2 full.
The editing software, like most bundled software, is [...]. It's great if you don't have anything else but it can be flaky on some computers. After installation it does try to contact HP for regular updates but there is no option to turn this off. If you have a personal firewall running and set to alert you when things try to get on the internet, then you will see this pop up. Go ahead and block it, it doesn't hurt anything. For those of you with a little more computer skills you can edit your start-up and nix the offending HP app. That also does not hurt anything.
The ink cartridges can be filled with kits, so if you like to do that then you can save some money over the long run.
If you aren't in a hurry or in a high-output business environment, this has been a very dependable printer for us and since we have bought it for photo printing we have not been disappointed at all, but with the cost of ink and quality paper someone might be better off getting their prints done at Wal Mart (or wherever) if per-print cost is a major issue in their personal usage. For us, we like being able to create and frame photos from home.
Semi pro photographer [Posted on 2006-12-13]
I purchased the HP 8450 about a year and a half ago. I see complaints in other reviews about the speed and the cost of ink, but if you were to send photos off to a photo lab, not only would it take more time and money but the quality would not be any better. I find the print quality as good as and professional lab that I have used, if not better. I print around 30 to 50 photos a month, mainly to sell to customers and this is a lot more economical than a lab. If you are looking for Wal-Mart quality go to Wal-Mart. But if you are looking for professional quality I can not say enough about the HP 8450.
The WORST printer I have ever used! [Posted on 2007-04-24]
This printer is GARBAGE. I have used printers since 1989 and this is definitely the worst. I owned a few Epsons with no problems at all, I only upgraded as the technology improved, not because any of them were broken or didn't work.. and I think next time I will go back to an Epson. The hp is a "photo" printer, but if you put more than 3 pieces of photo paper in it at a time, it will jam and waste your paper and ink. It also will not do envelopes without hand feeding it one at a time, hand printing would almost be faster! I have had this printer for over 2 years and the only reason I am writing a review now is because I just tried to put regular paper in it and print a single page word document and it jammed yet again and it was just the last straw. Don't waste your money. This printer is way too expensive, and in my opinion, total junk! My husband bought it because of the memory card capability, but as far as I can tell that is the only redeeming quality of this printer at all. I will take great pleasure in smashing this one to bits whenever I get around to buying another Epson!!
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