HP's Photosmart D7460 is one of several models that combine photo printing with document printing. Targeted at families and small businesses that print their own photos, it is network-ready with wired and wireless connectivity options plus memory card slots for direct printing. The USB port on the front panel is PictBridge-enabled, which means you can print directly from compatible digital cameras.
Most direct printing functions are accessed via the 3.5-inch colour touch-screen, which adjusts through 90 degrees via a series of click-stops. This screen is bright, colourful and easy to view and the user interface is straightforward. There are only four buttons on the top panel: the power switch, Print Photo button, Cancel and Red Eye Removal. Indicator lights are provided to show the 802.11b/g wireless connection is on and indicate operational problems.
Paper handling is similar to other HP Photosmart printers we've reviewed in that all paper is loaded face down. Two input trays are provided: a main tray that pulls out from the lower part of the front panel and a smaller photo tray to its right. Adjustable paper guides are provided for the supported paper sizes and up to 100 sheets of plain paper can be loaded into the main tray at a time. Above both sits an output tray, which can be raised to allow paper to be loaded in the trays below. A clear window above the photo paper tray lets you check whether paper is loaded.
The 10 x 15 cm paper tray sits above the tray that holds A4 paper.
Six individual ink cartridges are used for printing, each containing HP's Vivera dye ink. The Black ink cartridge holds 10 ml and has an RRP of $29.95. Each colour cartridge holds 5.5 ml of ink and sells for $15.95, so there's almost $110 worth of ink in the printer when you buy it. Unfortunately, HP does not offer larger cartridges for this printer.
Lightfastness ratings for these inks, using tests developed by Wilhelm Imaging Research, are 100+ years on HP Premium Plus Photo Paper, 40+ years on HP Advanced Photo Paper and 80+ years on HP Premium Photo Paper when prints are framed behind glass. Preliminary results of ozone fading tests suggest fade resistance for unprotected prints is between 30 and 60 years.
Set-up
Setting up the Photosmart D7460 is uncomplicated – but time consuming. Once you've removed the printer from its box and taken off all the packaging materials, the next step is to connect the mains power and install the ink cartridges. They slot into bays beneath the printer's top cover. These are colour-coded to show you which cartridge fits where.
The ink cartridges slot into bays beneath the top cover.
A display on the LCD panel shows where the ink cartridges are positioned.
Instructions on the LCD tell you to load some plain white paper into the main tray. Photo paper is loaded into the smaller tray on the right of the main tray. Pressing the OK button on the screen starts the head alignment process, which ends with a sheet of patterns being printed. The LCD indicates whether alignment was successful.
The next step is to load the software and connect the printer to your computer via a USB cable. The software disk that should be supplied with each printer was not included with the test unit but we were able to download the relevant drivers and software from HP's website (www.hp.com.au). We estimate this added approximately 10 minutes to the overall set-up time.
Printer installation is largely wizard based and very straightforward.
We can't say whether installing the software and drivers would have been quicker if we'd had them on disk. However, we can say it took just over 35 minutes to install the software and bring the Photosmart D7460 to a point where we could commence printing. During this process we noticed lots of back-and-forth communications between our computer and either the printer or an online source of information. Intermittently, marketing screens from HP were displayed on our computer's monitor promoting, "Exceptional Product Offers and Discounts for HP Customers", which we found mildly irritating. We would have preferred a faster set-up without marketing! However, the wizard-based installation system achieved its objective and all pop-up screens were easy to understand.
One of the marketing screens that pops up while the pritner is beign installed.
The HP Solution Centre, which is installed with the software, lets you transfer images from a camera or memory card to your computer, access the Photosmart Essential software and check ink levels. You can also configure the network Bluetooth connections for the printer via the Settings button in this facility.
The HP Solution Centre.
One of the beauties of the Photosmart D7460 is its networking capabilities. As well as connecting the printer to your computer via USB cable, you also have the options of wired (Ethernet) or wireless (WLAN 802.11) network connection. An Ethernet port is located on the rear of the printer for the former. If you connect via a wireless router, you need to input the network name (SSID) and WEP key or pass-phrase. The printer can also be connected to a wireless-capable computer without using a wireless router or access point but security is lower and performance is slower.
Printing
Inserting a memory card or plugging a USB connected camera (or storage device) opens Photosmart Express on the touch-screen. This interface has five buttons: View, Print, Create, Share and Save. Pressing the View button calls up a nine-shot index view and you can zoom in on a selected shot by tapping on it or scroll through all images in the connected device, nine at a time.
The Photosmart Express screen that appears on the printer's LCD and is used for all direct printing.
All the images in the device can be printed by pressing Print Photos button on the printer. (Fortunately, the printer will ask you to confirm that's what you wish to do!) Several editing options (rotate, crop, remove red-eye, photo fix, add frame, adjust brightness and colour effect) are available when you select a single shot. You can print images individually as you go or store them in a batch before printing them. When you print from the main screen, the wizard asks you to choose a print layout from a range of single- and multi-shot layouts. Up to 63 images can be printed on a single A4 sheet.
The Create button lets you produce album pages, panoramas, passport and wallet-size photo prints and prints from video clips – which can be played through the touch screen. The Share and Save buttons take you to your computer and opens the HP Photosmart Essential software application. Choosing Share connects you to HP's Snapfish service or you can elect to use your own email program. The Save button lets you transfer images and videos from a camera, memory card or USB drive to your PC – but you can't transfer files between a memory card and USB drive.
Printing from a computer via a software application opens the HP Driver, which provides access to a Printing Preferences panel with four sub-menus covering Advanced, Printing Shortcuts, Features and Colour. The default setting opens the Printing Shortcuts sub-menu, where you can select from General Everyday Printing (the default setting), Photo Printing-Borderless, Photo Printing- with white borders, A4 Landscape, Two-sided (Duplex) Printing, Presentation Printing, Fast Economical Printing, Postcard Printing and Factory Defaults.
The Printing Shortcuts page, which opens by default when you print via a software application.
If that's not enough, you can modify any of these settings and save the result as a new name, selecting from a range of paper sizes and types, choosing from six quality settings, and between Portrait and Landscape orientation. You can also apply HP's Real Life Technologies (RLT) photo fixes – or switch this function off.
The Advanced sub-menu covers various printer functions, such as margins, overspray, dry time, ink volume and poster printing and page ordering. The Features sub-menu provides many of the same choices as the Printing Shortcuts sub-menu, including paper sizes and types, quality settings, orientation and RLT settings. It also lets you check output resolution (which is determined by the Print Quality setting).
The Features page, showing the range of print quality settings.
The Colour sub-menu allows you to choose between colour and greyscale output and select either ColorSmart/sRGB or Adobe RGB as the colour management colour space. Clicking on the More Colour Options button on this page opens the Advanced Colour Settings sub-menu, where you can adjust brightness, saturation and 'colour tone', tweak cyan, magenta, yellow and black levels and preview the results on 'Before' and 'After' thumbnails.
The Colour page.
Greyscale options.
Advanced Colour Settings.
Clicking on the Printer Services button on the Colour page accesses printhead alignment and cleaning and diagnostic and testing functions and lets you configure the Bluetooth settings. You can also display the 'estimated ink levels' via this interface.
Bluetooth configuration options.
Unlike many other inkjets, the Photosmart D7460's ink warning monitor only appears when ink levels are genuinely low. We were able to make one additional A4 print before printing was stopped because the Photo Magenta cartridge was depleted. Changing cartridges was straightforward and instructions and diagrams and provided with all cartridges. The printer whirrs and grumbles for a minute or so after the cartridge is installed and then returns to ready status.
The ink levels monitor.
Interestingly, when you change an ink cartridge the printer does not 'memorise' the details of the last picture you wanted to print. However, the software does and clicking on the print command in your editing software takes you back to the settings you applied.
Performance
Overall print quality from the test printer was generally good – but not up to the standard serious photographers would desire. Colour distribution was slightly more even than the similarly-priced Kodak EasyShare 5300 printer and B&W prints, though not totally neutral in hue, were closer to neutral than the Kodak prints. However, we felt Kodak's software had a more informative and useful user interface than HP's Photosmart Essential and provided better facilities for fine-tuning prints.
Printing times were slower than the EasyShare 5300 and depended on the type of original, output size and quality selected and the interface used. The time to produce a snapshot-sized print via one of the direct printing interfaces varied between about 40 seconds and just over a minute, depending on the amount of spooling required to start the printing process.
When printing from a computer, the average snapshot printing time was one minute and 19 seconds in Best mode or 41 seconds in Normal mode. A4 prints took two-and-a-half minutes on average with the Best quality settings and 51.6 seconds in Normal mode. In all cases we have included a spooling time of approximately 18 seconds before actual printing commenced. The Fast Draft and Fast Normal settings were quicker but visibly reduced output quality.
HP provides information on average page yields for its printers, with the Photosmart D7460 data appearing at http://h10060.www1.hp.com/pageyield/au/en/PSD7400/photo.html. On the basis of our tests, we feel some of these figures could be a little high. We were able to produce the equivalent of 28 A4-sized prints before the first ink warning appeared. Interestingly, we still had about 30% of the yellow ink and almost all of the other ink cartridges were close to full at this point. On the basis of our tests, we calculate each A4 print uses approximately 0.45 ml of ink, which gives an ink cost of approximately $1.28 per A4 print and about 30 cents for a snapshot print.
A few minor irritants made this printer slightly frustrating to use. The most significant from a photographer's viewpoint is finding it took at least an hour for print colours to fully stabilise. This complicates matters when you wish to make test strips in order to get colours and tones right before committing to a full A4 print.
B&W prints emerged from the printer with obvious green and magenta casts, which were initially quite alarming. However, once their colours stabilised, they were more neutral than B&W prints from the Kodak EasyShare 5300, although traces of yellow-green remained. In most cases, the on-screen display on a properly calibrated monitor gave a good indication of the final appearance of our prints, although further fine-tuning of tonal settings was occasionally required.
We suspect most users of this printer would have little interest in test-printing and be happy with the results that come with minimal adjustment. On the whole, they were as detailed and colour-accurate as many minilab prints we've seen – and probably longer-lasting.
A second irritant concerned the placement of images on the paper when you opt to print with white borders and print from a software application. Although you might think you have placed the picture centrally on the paper – and it appears on your screen that this has been done – the test printer persistently got the one of the longer borders just a little too wide. To add to the annoyance, the pictures themselves were frequently one to two degrees off kilter
Loading HP's software creates another minor irritation because a GUI panel pops up on your computer screen each time you start the computer, regardless of whether you wish to print. Almost as irritating when you wish to print from a software application instead of the touch-screen is the way the printer defaults to the General Everyday Printing setting each time you select 'Print'. This may be appropriate for document printing but it's frustrating when you want to print photos.
A few minor miss-feeds occurred when we were making A4 prints. However, no paper jams were experienced and when a more serious paper feed problem occurred, the printer stopped printing before any ink had hit the paper and displayed a warning message that enabled us to salvage the sheet of paper for re-use. It also saved the picture we had been working on with all the adjustments we had applied, allowing us to print it without having to re-set the printing parameters.
Conclusion
For a device that is only designed for printing, HP's Photosmart D7460 combines plenty of useful features with a very simple user interface and easily understood controls. A fast and capable text printer, it is also usable for hobbyist photo printing. However, the quality of the prints from the test unit was not quite up to a standard that would suit serious photographers.
Print colours were reasonably bright and accurate enough for amateur photographers contrast was adequate and we found no evidence of surface irregularities in our prints. However, the finer tonal nuances that we have come to expect from a high-quality photo printer simply weren't evident. That said, this printer would be a good choice for family snapshooters who want an affordable printer for documents containing text and graphics that can produce acceptable A4 and snapshot prints at an affordable cost.
Printer type: Thermal inkjet
Resolution: Up to 4800 x 1200 optimised dpi colour (when printing from a computer and 1200 input dpi)
Paper sizes: A4 (210 x 297 mm), A5 (148 x 210 mm), DL (110 x 220 mm), C6 (114 x 162 mm), A6 (105 x 148 mm), 300 x 100 mm, 130 x 180 mm, 100 x 150 mm (with or without tear-off/cut-off tab)
Max. paper weight: 300 gsm
Ink cartridges: HP 363 Black Ink Cartridge (10 ml), HP 363 Cyan, Magenta, Yellow, Light Cyan and Light Magenta Ink Cartridges (5.5 ml each)
Printing speeds: up to 34 pages per minute (ppm) black and 33 ppm colour
Interfaces: USB 2.0 Hi-speed, PictBridge, Ethernet, memory card slots, HP bt500 Bluetooth Wireless Printer and PC Adapter, 3.5-inch touch-screen colour LCD
Power consumption: 5 watts maximum
Acoustic noise: 6.8 B(A) (printing in fast draft mode) 6.0 B(A) (printing in normal mode)
Dimensions (wxhxd): 462.5 x 172.9 x 387.3 mm
Weight: 7.98kg