Steves Digicams - HP Photosmart 8450 Photo Printer

Windows Print Driver (cont.)

Basics

The Basics page lets you set the orientation (portrait or landscape) or mirror if printing on backlight inkjet film. Select the page order (front to back or back to front). Number of copies and whether to collate or not. And to enable the Print Preview option (see further below.)

Clicking on the Advanced button brings up this page of settings.

Color

The 8450 offers enhanced color management capabilities. Check the "Print in grayscale" for the best looking B&W prints or for normal color printing the options are: Colorsmart/sRGB, Adobe RGB or Managed by application. For most users the default Colorsmart/sRGB will yield excellent results. The printer software also offers ICC profile support to give more knowledgable users greater flexibility in color management.

Color - Advanced

Click on the Advanced button to gain access to the individual controls for saturation, brightness and color tone plus separate control of the amount of cyan, magenta, yellow and black colors.

Services

The Services page gives you access to maintenance options (align the printer, print test page, clean cartridges, calibrate color and print a sample page. From here you can also check the estimated ink levels in the installed cartridges. And check the current hardware configuration.

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.

Steve's Conclusion

The Photosmart 8450's photo print quality is nothing short of excellent and rivals the output of the best photo inkjet printers that we've used. It isn't as fast as the Canon "i" and the new 2004 "iP" series printers, but it is faster than previous HP photo printer models that we reviewed last year.

Print Type/Size	Quality	Print Time
Borderless 4 x 6-inch	Fast Normal	0m:47s
Borderless 4 x 6-inch	Normal	1m:07s
Borderless 4 x 6-inch	Best	2m:12s
Borderless 4 x 6-inch	Maximum dpi	4m:15s
Borderless 8.5 x 11-inch	Normal	3m:02s
Borderless 8.5 x 11-inch	Best	5m:25s
Borderless 8.5 x 11-inch	Maximum dpi	10m:20s
Borderless 4 x 12-inch	Best	4m:07s

(Calculated printing a 4-megapixel image from a computer via USB. Automatic paper sensing feature was enabled which adds a few seconds to the reported print times. Timing begins at paper feed and stops when the paper drops in the output tray, it does not include computer processing time.)

Click to see a larger (550Kb) picture!

This is a 600dpi scan of a black & white print produced on the HP 8450. Most other photo inkjet printers are only "mediocre" black and white printers and usually induce a bluish or silver tone on the print. The HP 8450 produces deep and rich blacks with a wide range of intermediate grays thanks to its special Photo Gray ink cartridge.

Here's a scan of a borderless panorama print. Using HP's 4 x 12-inch Premium Plus Photo Paper it's now possible to make prints of your multi-photo "stitched" panoramic images.

The majority of digital cameras made from that start of 2004 and into the foreseable future support the new PictBridge direct-USB printing technology. Your PictBridge-enabled camera is plugged into the printer's front USB port using the camera's regular USB download cable. The digital camera displays a special PictBridge printing menu and you select the photos to print using the camera's color LCD and control buttons.

The 8450 also functions as a general-purpose color and black-text printer as well as a high-speed USB 2.0 multi-format card reader when it's connected to your computer. You can make prints anywhere there's an AC power outlet without a computer by directly reading the camera's flash card and using the printer's big 2.5-inch color LCD. With a suggested retail price of $299, the HP Photosmart 8450 is an excellent value for today's digi-photographers.

US visitors Pavilion A6530f Desktop (2.1GHz Phenom X3 8450, 4GB DDR2, 640GB, DVD±RW DL, Windows Vista Home Premium 64-bit)

	$ 639.00 at MacMall
	$ 639.99 at Circuit City
	$ 639.99 at TigerDirect
	$ 649.98 at STAPLES
	$ 639.99 at Newegg.com
	$ 639.99 at HP Home & Home Office Store
	$ 639.00 at J&R
	$ 639.99 at Best Buy
	$ 639.99 at CompUSA

UK visitors HP Photo Ink Cartridge No. 348 For 2610/2710/8150/8450/4280/5280..

£ 18.67 at PC Ink

Want a second opinion?

Photo-I's HP 8450 review

Return to our

Go to Steve's

751,955,950