In summary
HP’s Photosmart 8750 inkjet printer is the most affordable A3 printer on the market that produces long-lasting, prints that are good enough to exhibit or sell. Initially, its sheer size is daunting, although its weight is similar to the Epson R2400. However, you can’t fairly compare these two printers as the Epson is twice the price of the HP model. Not surprisingly, the 8750 is slightly noisier and we had more problems with paper jams and incorrect loading. . . [more]
Full review
HP’s Photosmart 8750 inkjet printer is the most affordable A3 printer on the market producing long-lasting prints that are good enough to exhibit or sell. Initially, its sheer size is daunting, although its weight is similar to the Epson R2400. However, you can’t fairly compare these two printers as the Epson is twice the price of the HP model. Not surprisingly, the 8750 is slightly noisier and we had more problems with paper jams and incorrect loading. But, in the value for money stakes, the HP 8750 is hard to beat.
Several options are provided for paper loading. Single sheets of paper are loaded face down through a slot in the front panel. You have to push the sheet well in before the feeder takes it up. Prints feed out just above this input slot. There’s also a front-loading magazine that accepts up to 25 sheets of photo paper and a rear feed slot for heavyweight media up to 11.5mm thick.
The inkset consists of three cartridges, each with three colours. There’s a standard FP Tri-Colour cartridge with cyan, yellow and magenta inks, an HP Blue Photo cartridge with blue, light cyan and light magenta inks and an HP Grey Photo Print cartridge with light grey, dark grey and black inks. For those who like to use only black inks for B&W printing, a Grayscale setting in the Colour section of the printer driver allows you to print just with the third cartridge. However, using the full ink set also produced excellent results from B&W image files on a wide range of papers (including heavyweight ‘fine art’ papers).
The test printer’s driver was somewhat idiosyncratic. You had to sidestep the default ‘Printing Shortcuts’ page where the more automated settings are found and ‘dig deeper’ for the higher levels of control that it provides. Unfortunately, with the test printer it frequently defaulted back to A4 or 6×4-inch print size when a larger print was required, particularly if other settings had been changed after the paper size was input via the Printing Shortcuts menu. However, Photoshop users will find it has the required colour handling, printer profile and rendering intent options. You can also opt to preview prints before committing to output (although the preview is seldom an accurate match for the final print, so this facility is best used simply for checking print size and image position).
There are a couple of nice features in the driver GUI, including the ability to adjust the amount of ink printed on the page and set longer drying times for heavily-inked prints. You can also select the amount of ‘overspray’ for borderless prints. For novice photographers, the ‘HP Digital Photography’ button opens a dialog box with settings for red-eye correction, contrast, sharpness and focus fine-tuning, image smoothing, and brightening up shadows in backlit shots. These work reasonably well, on the whole, but not as well as similar controls in editing software, so they are best kept for direct printing situations. Here, the 8750 has slots for all popular memory cards plus PictBridge compatibility for direct printing via a USB cable. USB 2.0 and Ethernet enablement allow the printer to be used in networked situations.
As far as output quality is concerned, you have to be very picky to find fault with either colour or B&W prints from this printer. Colour prints from a variety of image files had high visual impact and bright, saturated colours, while monochrome prints were clear of colour casts. Overall contrast was slightly elevated and close inspection of prints revealed some tiny faults in the half-toning that sacrificed fine highlight and shadow detail.
We recorded the following printing times:
- 6×4-inch snapshot print – 2 min 17 sec.
- A4 print – 3 min 50 sec.
- A3 print with the highest quality settings – 12 min 20 seconds.
Print longevity is a strong feature of the HP 8750. The combination of HP Vivera inks and Premium Plus paper has been given a WIR lightfastness rating of more than 100 years when prints are framed under glass. Details can be found at http://www.wilhelm-research.com/hp/8750.html.
A full set of inks costs $140 and a 25-sheet pack of A3 paper can be had for around $56. We estimate the approximate cost of an A4 print at around $4.50, while an A3 print costs roughly $8.50. Wastage of approximately 10% is assumed in each case. [24]
Specifications
Maximum resolution: Colour – up to 4800 ‘optimised dpi’ (1200 input dpi); Black – up to 1200 x 1200 rendered dpi
Interfaces: USB 2.0, Ethernet
Paper sizes: A3, A4, A5, A6, Letter, B5, Legal, Executive, Half Letter, 10 x 15cm, 4″ x 6″, 5″ x 8″, 8″ x 10″ (weights from 60 to 240 gsm)
Ink cartridges: HP 102 Gray, HP 97 Tri-colour, HP 101 Blue
Colour Management: Direct Adobe RGB and sRGB support, ICC colour management, application-based colour management, manual adjustment.
Dimensions (wxhxd): 642.6 x 254.7 x 613mm
Weight: 11.8kg
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