Hewlett-Packard B8550 Black Friday Deals!
 |
Hewlett-Packard B8550 Black Friday Deals!.
Product: Hewlett-Packard B8550 Amazon Price: Too low to display Availability: In Stock |
Compare Prices on Hewlett-Packard B8550
As a long-time photographer and graphic designer, I'm ravishing familiar with printing in queer formats. The HP Photosmart B8550 is the second large-format printer I've owned, and will be replacing an HP Deskjet 1220C for the majority of my photography printing and graphic produce work.
Overview:)
-----------------
The Photosmart B8550 is a large-format printer, marvelous of printing photographs and posters as tall as 13" x 19". If you unbiased want to print 4" x 6" weekend snapshots or if you don't understand why someone would want to print something so huge, this is **NOT** the printer for you. This printer is very, very gigantic and is designed primarily for people who want to print very titanic photographs and digital images.
The Physical Object:)
------------------------
The Photosmart B8550 is surprisingly sleek and sexy-looking for a large-format printer, and is significantly smaller and more ravishing than the 13x19 printer it will be replacing. The LCD cover is shiny and distinct, and the printer feels solid and well-built.
The printer's included software integrated snappily and seamlessly with my various photo-editing programs. I was very pleasantly surprised both with how magnificent the printer is, and with how well it works with Photoshop, Illustrator, Light Room, Aperture, and iPhoto.
The Prints:)
------------------
The prints from the Photosmart B8550 are nothing short of reliable respectable. I have printed 3"x5", 4"x6", and 8.5"x11" photographs and have been awed by the quality of the prints I glean from this machine. When using the recommended HP Advanced Photo Paper prints of all sizes tested came out gleaming and determined and were absolutely dry to the touch within seconds of coming out of the printer.
The quality of the prints is so profitable that friends who I have shown them to have been unable to distinguish them from lab-created prints, and two of my friends have had me print enlargements of their wedding photos because they understanding the quality of the prints I showed them was BETTER than the prints they got from their professional photographers.
Speaking from experience, the people who are complaining about the quality of these prints are DEFINITELY doing something outrageous. I don't know if they're using the immoral paper, printing on the disagreeable side of the paper, or using the cross settings, but if you consume the recommended paper and the right settings on the printer you will acquire Amazing results.
The Supplies:
--------------------
One of the most surprising things about this printer is how affordable the recommended replacement supplies are.
The paper is surprisingly affordable, with 50-packs of 8.5x11 or 100-packs of 4x6 glossy HP Advanced Photo Paper costing roughly $20. Likewise, the ink is surprisingly cheap, with replacement cartridges being priced at roughly $15 each.
To attach this in perspective, the ink and paper for the large-format Epson printer at my office costs more than twice as distinguished as the supplies for this printer, and the results are markedly detestable.
CONCLUSION:
-----------------------
The HP Photosmart B8550 is, without a doubt, the finest home printer I have ever owned, and is one of the best 13x19 printers I have ever outmoded. In fact, this is the best printer under $1,000.00 that I have ever feeble, bar none.
The print quality is nothing short of outstanding, the wide variety of compatible sizes design this a very versatile printer, and the affordable supplies effect this printer a joy to employ and pleasant for hobbyists and photography enthusiasts.
While this may not be the printer for everyone it is an worthy choice for anyone who is enthusiastic in printing enormous photographs, and saving a astronomical deal of money by printing enlargements for themselves instead of sending them to a lab.
I have been enthusiastically recommending the HP Photosmart B8550 to all my photographer friends, and would suggest this to anyone who has a DSLR camera and wants to try printing gargantuan, shapely pictures of their accepted shots.
This is the most affordable, highest quality, consumer photo printer I have ever ancient, and I am constantly surprised by the high quality of the results.
This printer joins my home office in addition to a Canon Pixma Pro9000 substantial format photo printer and an older Epson RX500 All-in-One printer/scanner/copier. I tend to mainly spend the Epson for low-color non-photo printing since it seems to be the most wasteful with ink usage (replacing its 6 ink cartridges is not cheap and the printer annoyingly always uses some of the 5 non-black color inks even if you are printing a black-and-white text-only page), with the HP B8550 and Canon Pro9000 being feeble exclusively for photo printing. I am a serious amateur photographer with method more DSLR cameras, lenses, and gear than can be justified given that I have never earned any income from my photography, but I appreciate printing everything from 4x6 photos to 13x19 enlargements. I frame the 13x19 photos and circulate displays of photos on walls around my house, as well as print photos for friends, so I screech that is my "payback" for this hobby. My photography interests include people and pets, go and vacation photos, nature photography and macro close-ups, and John Fielder-inspired wide-angle shots of landscapes and wilderness.
The HP B8550 is a well-made printer with a variety of thoughtful features built into it that accentuate its usability for those looking for a mid-range tremendous format photo printer. If your main interest is in printing lots of 4x6 photos or if you are impartial using a low-resolution digital camera with a tendency to choose blurry photos, you may be unbiased as delighted using a less expensive photo printer since a 13x19 photo will accentuate the imperfections that were caused by a abominable camera shot. Also, if you print more documents than photos, a photo printer like this should not be your only considerable printer.
Unlike the Canon Pro9000, the B8550's control panel includes a 2.4-inch color LCD reveal. It has a surprising variety of built-in functions. You can insert various memory cards into the printer and, impartial using the control panel without needing to access the computer, acquire functions such as:
** Build "Red Behold Removal" editing on your photos.
** Print out ruled notebook paper, graph paper, music paper, a task checklist, and even a fairly absorbing maze.
** Dapper and align the printhead.
** Print a "Printer Residence Relate" that shows the printer's model and serial number, how many pages you have printed so far, and the date when you installed each of the 5 ink cartridges.
** Spot language and country/region preferences for the displays.
** Effect and assemble photo album pages, invent panorama prints, acquire wallet and passport photos.
** Thought and edit photos that are on your memory card. Rotate, chop, resize, form a "Photo Fix" adjustment (which I did not really ever rep to be useful), adjust brightness on the photo, add a "Color Execute" of Black&White, Sepia, or Antique, develop a Print Preview, add a date note to the photo being printed.
While the basic photo-editing functions suffice for printing 4x6 photos without needing to exercise the computer, if you are printing larger photos (especially 13x19 photo paper), you really should be editing your photos from your computer where you can view a remarkable larger shroud since the 2.4-inch LCD demonstrate only allows rudimentary previews of photos similar to the 2.5-inch LCD on digital cameras. But it is nice to at least give the user the option to insert memory cards or a USB storage contrivance into the printer and immediately initiate printing after performing some basic photo editing. You can also connnect a PictBridge camera to the USB port on the front of the printer.
Installation and set-up of the B8550 printer hardware went smoothly. In addition to the included "Originate Here" set-up instructions, when you first turn on the printer, the LCD conceal also guides you, using short spellbinding videos, through the installation of the printhead and ink cartridges, and the loading of the paper into the two trays, the "photo tray" that holds 4x6 and 5x7 photo paper and the "main tray" that holds the larger paper sizes on up to the 13x19 paper.
The one aspect of the printer that I contemplate to be a mechanical originate flaw is in the diagram the output tray and paper extender lock into situation when raised up to a 45-degree angle. The output tray and paper extender are housed in one unit that sits above and covers the main paper input tray below it. To access the main paper input tray, you pivot the output tray up and it clicks into location at a raised 45-degree angle, allowing you access to set paper onto the main paper input tray. But the output tray is held at this 45-degree angle with such a loose grip that a tiny bump of the printer can cause the output tray to slam encourage down hard to its horizontal place. This happened twice on my printer and, both times, the output tray swung relieve downward with such force that I had to check that the plastic hinge on the output tray did not fracture or crack. Luckily, the tray remained intact, but I learned the lesson not to leave the output tray propped up at its 45-degree angle for too long and to carefully lower it relieve down with my hand underneath it whenever I load modern paper into the main paper input tray.
Towards the destroy of the B8550 printer set-up, you install the CD software which contains the printer driver along with various other software, some of which I considered useful and some of which I considered useless clutter that eats up disk set and system memory. The CD install gives you the option for either a "recommended" whine installation or a more manual select-what-you-want custom installation. I selected the screech installation, which turned out to be a unpleasant, but correctable, decision. When I completed the CD installation, I was able to print my first photos in less than 30 minutes from the time that I initially took the printer out of the box.
But I was surprised by both the hundreds of megabytes of disk state ragged and the number of extra HP-specific processes now running on my Windows XP Task Manager (listed with their KB of memory usage) :
ACDaemon.exe : 2180KB
ACService.exe : 2076KB
hpqbam08.exe : 3920KB
hpqgpc01.exe : 6692KB
hpqste08.exe : 8508KB
hpswp_clipbook.exe : 3624KB
hpwuSchd2.exe : 2200KB
hpqtra08.exe : 11744KB
By comparison, my Epson Space Monitor only consisted of one process running that former fair a share of the memory that all those HP processes required:
E_S4I2K1.EXE 2712KB
So I started to think what HP applications I wanted to support and what I wanted to assume. My computer has 2 GB of memory and over 600 GB of disk station, but I do not want to clog this up with unused applications.
The "hpqtra08.exe" process is the HP Digital Imaging Monitor; I kept that.
The ACDaemon.exe/ACService.exe processes are interested in checking for updates for the ArcSoft Print Creations software. I have sometimes extinct previous ArcSoft software to mainly build greeting cards (especially during the end-of-year holidays), so I wanted to withhold the ArcSoft software that was loaded during the CD installation. The B8550 printer also includes a "Creative Projects Guide" booklet that recount how you can exhaust the included ArcSoft Print Creations software to earn photo album pages, calendars, placemats, greeting cards, and frames. But the ACDaemon.exe/ACService.exe processes do not need to be always kept running and racy memory since you can manually inaugurate it up. I shut those down so that they did not always remain running.
Likewise, the "hpwuSchd2.exe" process that kept running is the HP Software Update process that performs scheduled checks for fresh and updated HP software. But it does not need to be kept always running since I can unbiased manually initiate it up from the Open menu on a periodic basis. So I venerable the Windows Registry Editor to delete its "HP Software Update" entry from: HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE:SOFTWARE:Microsoft:Windows:CurrentVersion:Run
The included "HP Bright Web Printing" software lets you selectively come by and edit Web page bellow from your browser to output to the printer. The application is supposed to work by embedding itself inside your browser, and then you can click the "HP Lustrous Engage" button that it adds to your browser's toolbar, and you utilize your mouse to highlight Web page convey that you wanted to secure into a "Clip Book", and from your browser's "Clip Book", you can then print unprejudiced the portions of various Web pages that you are eager in, instead of printing entire Web pages. A grand thought... but I could not find this to work. My Firefox (version 3) browser refused to accumulate this software as a add-on plug-in, and it also did not work with my Internet Explorer 7 browser for some reason. In addition, at one point, I saw a Windows system error message announcing that the "hpswp_clipbook.exe" process had crashed. So I had enough of this and went into the Control Panel's "Add or Hold Programs" and uninstalled the "HP Sparkling Web Printing".
"Shop for HP Supplies" is another program that the CD installs onto your computer and also places a shortcut for it on your desktop. But after trying it out, I found that it is only useful if you want to purchase your ink cartridges and printer supplies at MSRP list trace and do not ever shop around for the best trace. When you click on its desktop icon, it accesses a Web page called "SureSupply - Order supplies". But the ink cartridges were all offered at the (inflated) MSRP list stamp, and the only vendor options were either to prefer directly from HP, or from CDW or Staples online stores (Amazon was not an option listed on the Web page!) So I also uninstalled this program.
The printer's CD also installs the "HP Customer Participation Program 11.0". This is objective like the Microsoft Customer Participation Program, where this program will send encourage statistics of how you spend HP products so HP can improve on its products based on the gathered statistics. It is an opt-in program. But I wanted to recall this program and, in doing so, freed up over 60 megabytes of disk spot.
After I completed the printer CD installation, for some unusual reason, my Internet Explorer 7 browser could no longer play embedded Flash sigh on Web pages, even though embedded Flash applications collected worked on my Firefox browser. When accessing various Web pages that primitive Flash applications (including Amazon's "Listen to Music Samples" Flash application), the Web page would demonstrate the Adobe Flash download link and the Web page's embedded Flash application would not work. I presume that this was probably caused by the "HP Intellectual Web Printing" application embedding itself into my IE browser (and interfering with the browser's Flash plugin) because my IE browser could show Flash whine unbiased prior to the installation of the printer CD. The quandary persisted even after I uninstalled the "HP Shiny Web Printing" application. I actually had to go to the Control Panel's "Add or Catch Programs", uninstall both the "Adobe Flash Player ActiveX" and "Adobe Flash Player Plugin", and then re-install it from Adobe's Web situation in order to rep my IE-7 Flash functionality working again.
So even though I would rate the exact printer hardware 5 stars, my CD installation experience gets a rating of 2 stars. The CD was installed on a Windows XP (Service Pack 3) system. Your mileage may vary with Vista, Mac, or your enjoy flavor of Windows.
The B8550 printer's size is typical for a mountainous format printer. At 23 inches wide, it is overall smaller than my Canon Pro9000 since the Pro9000 also has a top-feed paper tray whereas the B8550 input and output trays both are in front of the printer. In fact, it is probably one of the smallest and lightest photo printers available that can print on 13x19 paper. But if you set this printer on your desk next to your computer, the footprint of this printer will likely gain a ample share of your desk. My home office from where I telecommute everyday working on e-commerce Internet applications consists of one desk, one computer workstation table, four 2-drawer file cabinets, and several bookshelves. Both the Canon Pro9000 and HP B8550 printers now sit on separate 2-drawer file cabinets. Like many printers, the B8550 does not include a USB cable (my Canon Pro9000 also did not include the USB cable, even though I contemplate that it is lame for manufacturers to not include the cable with their printers) . I actually had to combine a 10-foot A/B move USB cable with another USB extension cable in order to state this printer on another 2-drawer file cabinet that was farther away from the USB hub sitting on my desk. When venerable with the optional HP bt500 - Network adapter - USB - Bluetooth 2.0 EDR, you can connect this printer via Bluetooth. But I have not always been overjoyed with the consistency of Bluetooth connections, and so I decided to employ an extension USB cable instead. Another connectivity option that I considered was to consume the HP Wireless Printing Upgrade Kit (Q6236A) , but judging from the widely varying opinions about that product, I also stayed away from that option.
I found that the top of the 23-inch-wide printer made for a convenient region to keep 13x19 photos just after they are printed to ensure the inks are fully dry for a short period before further handling. And one nice aspect of 13x19-inch photo printouts is that they are very similar in size to the full-screen image that I preview on my 22-inch widescreen monitor. I also have to admit that after looking at my digital photos both on a 22-inch widescreen monitor and by selectively printing out 13x19 photos, I rarely print 4x6 or 5x7 photos anymore; 8x10 photos are now the smallest size that I print out.
Which brings me to the most valuable attribute for all photo printers: print quality. Taking into memoir the mid-range brand of this printer and the fact that it is one of the most inexpensive 13x19 photo printers, I would rate the print quality 5 stars. I selected various scenery and nature photographs that were taken using a Canon EOS 40D 10MP DSLR. On 4x6 photos, the B8550 output is pleasing grand identical to my Canon Pro9000. When comparing 13x19 photos using the best quality settings for both printers, however, my Canon Pro9000 does have slightly better color and clarity than the B8550. But the differences are very subtle... which is a very good surprise since I was comparing the output from the 4-ink-color (cyan-magenta-yellow-black) B8550 to the output from the 8-ink-color Pro9000. During these 13x19 photo comparisons, I was printing photos on the B8550 using both HP Advanced Glossy Photo Paper and HP Premium Plus Photo and Proofing Gloss paper. And the Pro9000 was printed using Canon papers. The Pro9000 is also about 40% more expensive than the HP B8550. Canon's Pro9000 is also packaged with far better software (aimed at the pro or serious amateur photographer) compared with what is included with the B8550.
Even though HP advertises that their "Vivera inks offer instant-dry, smudge-resistant photos", I left one exiguous thumbprint on the very edge of one of my first 13x19 printouts using their recommended HP Advanced Glossy Photo Paper when I immediately picked up the sheet the moment it fully came out of the printer. But if I carefully lifted the just-printed photo from the bottom and let it sit by itself for 5 or 10 minutes, the photo ink did admirably live up to the smudge-resistant claim as I was able to vigorously rub my thumb over unlit areas of the photo without creating smudges.
But for the casual/amateur photographer who wants a very affordably-priced mountainous format photo printer, this is a vast printer! HP obviously had to build some compromises to withhold the notice vulgar, but the pleasing print quality is pleasurable. I printed out 13x19 photographs that included a close-up macro photo of a butterfly standing on top of a purple coneflower, a wide-angle shot of a picturesque canyon filled with surreal rock formations and lots of earthtone hues along the canyon walls, photos of quiet mountain lakes with blue skies and swirling cirrus clouds overhead, etc, and they were all printed out in delicate color, rich in detail, with enthralling line boundaries in areas of the photos where there was high inequity and lots of color/shape transitions.
Let me initiate the review by stating that this is a PHOTO PRINTER. I emphasize this because a gigantic photo printer is not necessarily a astronomical everyday document printer. If you don't print a lot of photos or color fliers, but print mostly documents, then this is not the true printer for you. Printing simple documents is noisy, stupid, and expensive on a printer like this.
However, if you want a lab quality print up to 13" x 19" then the HP B8550 is a masterpiece. The print quality is so worthy that you literally could fire your photo lab and print all of your photos at home. This printer will posthaste pay for itself and put you a lot of money on photo processing.
The physical status up of the printer is easy and intuitive. The print cartridge carrier slipped upright in dwelling and the print cartridges are color and shape coded to simplify installation. For some outlandish reason, HP doesn't include a USB printer cable. This doesn't form any sense to me at all because you have to have one to consume the printer and they don't cost that powerful money. Luckily, I had a spare cable or else I wouldn't have been able to spend the printer until making another streak to the store! So be determined to accept a USB printer cable.
I consume the printer with an Apple iMac G4 so my review of the software is Mac OSX specific. I haven't tried the Windows software.
The Mac OSX software installed with ease and the printer was discovered and ready to print immediately. The software is colorful enough to alert the user if an depraved paper size is selected - a feature that is greatly appreciated! However, one must serene remember to decide the true paper size and appropriate print tray before printing. Given the cost of paper and ink for a specialty printer like this I can't overemphasize the importance of this. The software won't collect every user error. Check twice and print once!
Enjoy!
