Steves Digicams - HP Photosmart 7960 Photo Printer

If you click on the toolbar icon and select "Open x: hp photosmart 7900 series" then these are three Toolbox screens and options displayed.

Here's the Print Preview screen. I always enable the print preview option, it is your last chance to visually confirm that you have scaled the image properly and have selected the right media size. It can save you from wasting a piece of expensive photo paper because you had 4 x 6-inch media selected instead of 8.5 x 11-inch or vice-versa.

Before each print job this status screen will be displayed, here you can visually see
the amount of ink left in the cartridges and the various print time settings being used.

Mechanics & Performance

The Photosmart 7960 is a stylish looking, dark gray and silver colored printer that will easily fit into your computer workspace. Setup is straight forward and can be accomplished by following the steps outlined on the included big page of directions. You power up the printer (without it being connected to the computer) and install the ink cartridges, install the supplied software and then plug in the USB cable. Windows then loads the drivers and recognizes the new hardware and within a minute or two you're up and printing.

HP Photosmart 7960 Photo Printer

As packaged the Photosmart 7960 comes with four cartridges, the HP #57 (C6657A) tri-color, the HP #58 (C6658A) photo print, the #56 (C6656A) black and the new #59 (C9359A) Gray Photo cartridge. If you use the printer to produce regular documents you need to replace the #59 photo cartridge with the #56 black cartridge. There is a special place in the upper left of the top of the printer to store whichever cartridge is not being used.
HP supplies a "print cartridge protector" to keep fresh whichever cartridge is not being used. Just remember to replace the photo color cartridge before you print your next picture or else it won't be "photo quality."

HP Photosmart 7960 Photo Printer

One of the features of the Photosmart 7960 is a special photo paper tray for holding up to 20 sheets of 4 x 6-inch photo paper. You do not have to remove the regular 8.5 x 11-inch paper from the lower tray before printing a 4 x 6-inch photo. Simply push the photo tray slider lever forward until it stops, the printer will automatically feed the 4 x 6-inch photo paper into the printer instead of the letter size paper. If the photo tray runs out of paper the printer -will- feed paper from the regular tray without warning you, so you need to keep an eye on the amount of paper if printing more than one picture.

Steve's Conclusion
In operation the printer is very quiet except for initial paper load and the final eject which is somewhat noisy but not disturbing. The photo print quality is nothing short of excellent and rivals the output of more expensive photo inkjet printers. The HP 7960's print speed is not bad but it's not what I call robust. To print a borderless 4 x 6-inch at Best quality takes about 2m:34s, a borderless 8.5 x 11-inch at Best quality takes about 6m:18s. In comparison, the Canon i950 produces a true borderless 4 x 6-inch print in about 49 seconds and a borderless 8.5 x 11-inch print in just less than 2 minutes. (These times are calculated while printing from a computer using the USB connection.)

Click to see a larger (515Kb) picture!

Even in this small size on a web page you should be able to easily see how much better the HP 7960 is at printing true black and white than other inkjets. The printer we are comparing here is the 4800-dpi Canon i9100 which is a superb and fast color printer. However the B&W prints that it makes have a decided blue-silver cast to them, especially when compared to the HP 7960's deep and rich blacks and intermediate grays.

Photo (c) 2002 Dan Eisenman, All Pro Photo, Clearwater, FL

Here is a scan of a borderless 8.5 x 11-inch print. No scan can really duplicate an inkjet photo print properly due to the scanner's light being reflected off of the layers of ink and the surface of the paper itself. But this should give you an idea of the quality of the 7960's color prints, they are outstanding.
If you own one of HP's new digital cameras then you should consider the purchase of the Photosmart 7960 printer for its direct connect capability. These printers work in concert with the cameras to produce the best possible images with the least effort on the user's part. Just plug the two together or insert the memory card, it's really that easy!
And of course it functions as an all-purpose color and black-text printer as well as a multi-format card reader when it's connected to your computer. And let's not forget that you can take this printer with you and make prints almost anywhere without the need of a computer.