HP, certainly in the UK, seem to come a long way behind Epson and Canon in the market for inkjet photo printers. One reason for this may be HP’s use of combined ink cartridges and printheads. While this makes perfect sense in lots of ways - no worries about blocked heads - Just buy another ink cartridge.

However that does mean that running costs seem higher than the already very high costs of Epson and Canon cartridges, where only the ink is replaced. On top of that, results with HP photo printers are excellent only on HP or Kodak paper, again raising costs. I’ve yet to find a cheaper alternative that works at all with HP printers, so you really need the expensive stuff.

My favourite Fuji and Ilford papers just don’t work well with HP printers. Results aren’t even close to the quality from HP Premium Photo Paper Plus Photo Paper. For that reason this printer has spent some time in semi retirement in my basement until recently. While preparing material for this website I came across some of the original test prints I made when I bought this printer and was impressed at how good they still looked.

At the same time I was dealing with an order for framed prints of one of my pictures. The shot isn’t one of my best - it was grabbed during a shoot on a technical subject and is a very straight forward seascape taken on a sunny day when the sea actually was blue - The North Sea is often very green in sunshine in the summer months. All in all this should be really easy to print but it seems to bring out the worst in all my other printers.

The sea is already bright blue but they all seem to want to make it even more blue and no amount of profiling or tinkering seems to produce a true blue sea. In desperation I dug the HP Photosmart 7150 out of the basement, loaded up HP Premium Plus Photo Paper, and hey presto, with a simple minus 1 density correction, I had a great print. I was so pleased with the old HP Photosmart 7150 that ran a series of tests, and results were impressive. Good colour just seemed much easier with the HP.

Since then I’ve made lots of other tests with HP and Kodak Ultima Photo Paper and results are excellent enough that I’m considering buying the HP Photosmart 8750, despite already owning 3 A3 inkjet printers, which really ought to be enough for anyone.

So if you’re in the market for a photo printer, don’t forget HP.

hp Photosmart Recommended Photo Papers