Customer Reviews

HP PhotoSmart 7550 Inkjet Printer

5 star:		(34)
4 star:		(17)
3 star:		(7)
2 star:		(5)
1 star:		(10)

 

 

I have owned several HP and Epson photo quality printers.
Each has been pretty good, but had one or two annoyances
that grew more bothersome over time. Particularly as
consumer digital cameras have improved to the 3 and 4
megapixel level, it was necessary to do something about
the quality of home photo printers. I think HP had the
farthest to go and they have closed the gap and taken a
wide lead with the 7550. The move to seven inks (from
HP's usual 4)in this model and the ability to go as
high as 4800 X 1200 dpi, has answered my concerns about
larger prints from my 4 megapixel Canon camera. This
printer also has a simple loading mechanism for 4x6
snapshots and I really like the new print cartridge
access (to the right of the paper trays), which means
I no longer have to drag the printer out from under the
shelf to open its top and change a cartiridge. This,
plus the front paper loading mechanism, makes the 7550
a real low profile machine. The LCD and controls allow
you to print pictures without the computer, though that
is not a big deal to me. The printer is quiet and fast
and I haven't given it a picture yet that it hasn't
handled with beautiful results. HP claims the new inks
and papers it is releasing with these new model printers
will last 65 years. I'll get back to you about that
claim in 2067.

Let's forget the gadgets like the LCD viewer and card reading features for a moment and get to the nitty gritty. This printer prints EXCELLENT quality photos!

I upgraded from the HP Photosmart 1218, which was also a good printer. But with the 1218, even on the highest print settings, I saw pixels.

On the 7550, I printed a 4X6 of an outside skyline (taken with a digital camera) and literally could not see the pixels in the sky part!

The true test came when I printed 8X11 photos from a digital camera source. The pictures were taken inside, so I expected less detail when printed. Where there were solid colors, I saw NO pixels. It was excellent! The subject (person) in the picture also looked good.

Of course there were some pixels there, a little dithering, blur and bitmapping. I had to make some resolution adjustments in Photoshop to sharpen it. Finally, looking at the prints from about 1 foot away, they looked like PROFESSIONAL prints! In fact, they look so good, they're going to be used in a portfolio WITH professional prints.

I've read about the Canon being better, and maybe it is. But this one's nothing to shake a stick at. If you want a great printer with the extra features for digital camera users, this is the one I'd suggest!

Cons: Big; Rapid ink consumption when printing photos.

My wife wonders why I've bought so many printers over the years. I think it might be up to ten by now. I expect I will keep the 7550 a good long time. I have finally found what I've been searching for- a printer that does an outstanding job with photos and uses inks that will last while also doing a decent job as a document printer.

The 7550 uses 7 inks. I think that is the current high water mark for consumer printers. Yes, that much ink raises the cost of operation, but the results are worth it.

The few reviewers who have had problems with the printer sound to me like issues with simple fixes. It is unfortunate that HP service couldn't solve these issues. Mine worked perfectly out of the box. It is very customizable. If you always print pictures from the computer, great. If you want skip the computer and use memory cards, great. If you have an HP camera and want to plug in directly, great. I've used all three methods.

The photos produced are bright and detail is incredible. I can't vouch for the 65 year longevity claim (yet), but I can tell you the pictures resist fading. I've placed several in a sunny room just to see. After three months, there is no visible fade.

I wish HP and the other printer makers would stop trying to make us buy their own cameras and allow a true USB direct connect. And I wish HP would throw in the two-sided printing accessory instead of just leaving a place for it in the back of the printer. Those are my only two complaints with the 7550. I don't consider either issue a major point.

This printer has the easiest ink changing process and paper loading process of any HP I've owned. The LCD screen is handy and the control buttons are well marked and helpful. I particulary like the Print Cancel button.

Good job HP. Products like the 7550 will keep you at the top of the printer market.

This printer far exceeded my expectations. We had been looking for a good quality photo printer since I take mostly digital photos. We did a lot of searching around and checking reviews and finally settled on the HP 7550. We were a little hesitant because of the price, but it is well worth every penny! We bought it on December 27th, and I've already printed quite a number of photos. The installation was seamless and very simple, and the printer was ready to go within minutes. The photos print very fast, and they come out with no layering of ink as was noticeable with our old Epson. There is no waiting for the photos to dry, either.....a very nice improvement. These photos look like they were printed in a photo lab!!! The 4x6 borderless photo printing is very easy and looks great. Other pluses include separate paper trays for your HP 4x6 photo paper (200 sheets of HP Premium 4x6 paper come with the printer) and regular 8-1/2" x 11" printer paper.....no switching, and there is even a separate slot for envelopes. This printer is a little wider than average because it will hold all three ink cartridges, photo, tri-color, and black, and you never need to switch out cartridges depending on what you want to print. The door is also on the front, not the top, so it's very easy to access the cartridges.

Another great feature is the ability to print directly from your camera's memory card.....no more cords and downloads to deal with. It takes several different types of memory cards. Just pop the card in and your pictures come up on the LCD screen in seconds. You can toggle through your photos, select the ones you want to print, and even adjust the brightness, zoom, rotate, add fancy borders and frames, etc. You can also press the "save" button and the photos are automatically saved over to your computer. Browse to select the file you want them in, and it will even sort into separate folders for the month in which they were taken!! I can't say enough about this printer. I was able to download, print, and save my photos while my daughter was busy on the computer. What a time saver! The quality of the photos is excellent, and everything prints VERY fast. I would recommend this printer to anyone!!

SUMMARY
Pluses:
· Rugged, according to HP.
· Quiet operation with minimal vibration.
· Fade resistant ink, according to HP.
· Loaded with features, including a small display and a separate 4x6 tray.
· No cartridge swapping
Minuses:
· TWO-SIDED PRINTING ACCESSORY WORKS WITH PLAIN PAPER ONLY.
· Factory settings for color photos give dark, muted colors. (Fixable in most cases-see below.)

More pluses than I can cover within the 1,000 word limit. The software installs easily and runs glitch-free. Canceling a job doesn't send the printer and software into a tizzy like with my previous printer.

HP gives each of its printers a "recommended monthly volume, maximum" rating, which HP techies call the "duty cycle", which is how many pages the printer can print per month without dying young. This printer is rated at 5,000 pages per month, much higher than some of HP's cheaper printers.

Per HP support, "About 20,000 hours of use is the average mean time before failure if you stay within the duty cycle." So if HP is right, the 7550 will print many thousands of pages before it wears out. I tend to believe this because the printer's quiet operation (after loud clunks at the beginning of the paper feed), with little table shaking, suggests that it is not under much stress.

The impressive control panel includes four card slots, thirteen buttons, and a small LCD display. Yes, the 7550 is a small computer in its own right. For me, this is more a psychological edge than a practical advantage because I like to pass my photos through an editor and run the printer from my desktop computer.

It hasn't misfed a page yet, from either the main tray or the 4x6 tray, and the 4x6 photos print reliably, not sometimes tilted like with a gravity-fed printer.

HP claims that the ink will be fade resistant for 65 years, which is important to anyone who, like me, prints family history or other archival information intended to last for generations. (By the way, I recommend also using an acid-free paper. HP, will that extend the fade resistance beyond 65 years?)

I've spent ten hours, much paper, and half the ink in my color cartridges in testing this printer and learning its quirks and how to get the best results. Setting up a print job requires several software selections regarding dots per inch, paper type, and color handling. Or you can just set it on "Automatic" and hope for the best. Actually, when left on Automatic, the 7550 is pretty good at sensing the paper type and selecting the best dpi, but the color settings sometimes need manual intervention, as I will explain.

Factory settings for the 7550 darken and dull the colors in my Fuji 3.2-megapixel digital-camera photos. For example, a vibrantly green leaf among brown leaves turned into a green-brown splotch that no longer stood out. (The unedited photo, taken in bright sunlight, shows correctly on my monitor, which is set to True Color, 24-bit. However, for photos taken with the flash, the camera is also partly to blame for color washout.) BUT I can bring the colors back to life, without using a photo editing program, as follows: Click on the 7550 printer icon, then click on the Color tab, then move each of the three sliders two notches to the right, toward Vibrant, Lighter, and Warmer. This gives more differentiation between colors and simply makes the photo match reality. With this adjustment, the 7550 prints superb color photos. If I slide further to the right I can really jazz things up, but I may get weird effects such as the brown gutters on my house turning red. The two-notch adjustment works for landscape photos but is not necessary for canned art (which does fine with the factory settings), and it harms greyscale photos by adding a red haze. Based on one test that included a person's face, the skin tone was excellent with the adjustment, so I think that the adjustment works for most color photos. It may over-redden a photo where editing has already boosted the colors. If a page contains both a black-and-white photo and an unedited color photo, a compromise is needed-maybe all color sliders one notch to the right. Finally, all this color information is MY experience with the 7550. Your own camera and camera settings may give different results.

I guzzle ink and will boost HP's ink profits. If, say, the black ink well in the photo cartridge empties but the other two ink wells are half full, that's too bad. It's time to throw that ink away and buy a new ink cartridge. If you want efficient ink management, buy a Canon printer.

Finally, my big problem with this printer. A major reason why I bought a 7550 instead of a Canon S900 is that I print on both sides of the page. (I print books.) The 7550 and several other HP high-dpi printers allow attachment of an optional two-sided printing accessory, advertised as providing "brilliant photo-quality on both sides of the page." Once you buy the printer, its help text tells you that the accessory is for plain paper only. I had a long chat with HP's online tech support (which I like), and they stress that the two-sided printing accessory should be used only with paper weighing less than 24 lb. I have never seen a photo-quality paper below 24 lb. Even if a coated paper was that lightweight, one side would show through to the other. Note: HP's own two-sided photo quality paper is 36 lb. The whole idea of two-sided printing, let alone "brilliant photo-quality," is inconsistent with lightweight paper. HP throws me this consolation: If I run a thicker paper through the duplexing accessory (thus stretching its internal mechanisms) and never attempt to return to a thinner paper, it MAY continue to work, but they won't support this.

We bought the 7550 to print photos from our 4 megapixel camera. The printer has more functions than we're likely to use but the bottom line is output quality of this printer is STUNNING. It's better than any other printer I've seen. * That alone gets it 5 stars. *

Pluses:
+ Bundled software is actually very useful and easy to install.
+ Setup and driver installation was easy and went flawlessly.
+ 4x6 photo card feeder and auto paper sensor takes the guessworok out of printing photos.

+ Photo printing is better than I've seen on any other printer.
+ Employs 7 ink colors for excellent quality photos.

Minuses:
- I was quite put off by the fact that no USB cable was included. I actually had to run to the store to buy one in order to hook it up.
- This thing guzzles ink. Because of the cost of consumables, we are going to use the 7550 exclusively for photo printing. We have a Canon S630 that is no comparison when printing photos but has great quality for all around printing. We're keeping it since it is much more economical to operate than the HP. The Canon allows you to replenish ink tanks individually. With HP, when one color is exhausted in a 3-color cartridge, you throw it away. I wish HP would change this...
- The price was little difficult to swallow until I saw the output.

When I bought a 3 megapixel Olympus Digital Camera, I knew right away that I'd need to be able to print these pictures out. I've always used HP printers, and been happy with them, but there are a few to choose from.

I considered the 7150, the 7350, and this, the 7550. The print quality remained the same on all three (especially the 7350 and the 7550) but there were a couple things that put the 7550 over the top. First, the digital color LCD viewing screen and multiple card readers in most noticable. You'll probably NEVER preview pictures on this screen if you have a decent computer, but the bottom line is this printer doesnt NEED a computer to print pictures. Even then, the LCD screen will tell you if theres a paper jam, and you can cancel prints with a button on the printer instead of messing with the "cancel print" screen that usually prints 2 more pages before stopping.

The 2nd major difference is the ink cartridge holders. In the 7350, only two cartridges are held at once. Therefore if you wanna print pictures, you have to change to the photo cartridge by opening it up and physically removing it. The 7550 holds ALL 3 at once, which would seem much more convenient, and it is.

The bottom line is that this is HP's premier photo printer. It's thier top of the line, and it should be. It's got all the gadgets and features you probably don't need, but will like to show off to your freinds! (Looks sweet next to a loaded Dell 8200, trinitron monitor and klipsch 5.1 speakers!)

Hope this helps, good luck.

In the past year, I have purchased high end photo printers from Canon, Epson, Sony, Olympus and HP. This is my favorite printer. The only disadvantage relative to the other printers is that the Canon is significantly faster. The HP, especially since they added the third cartridge for longer lasting prints, wins in every other important category.

I first bought a Canon 900. Lousy pictures from any but Canon paper. Next was an Epson 850. Had to wait on the tubes to load. Picture quality great, but BAD ink smears at top of paper. Then bought the 7550! Unreal! Senses the type paper used and adjusts automatically. Print on ANY paper is outstanding! Photo prints from Canon S40 4.0 meg camera are WONDERFUL! Document printing is from the seperate and cheaper priced cartridge. Cartridge ink level is indicated. Why would ANYONE buy another printer? Forget the slightly higher price. It is worth every penny.

This is a pretty impressive printer. It has all the bells and whistles that a high end home photo printer should. The LCD monitor is the key feature. You can review your pictures right on the printer. By using the memory card reader, you can call up photos from Smart Media, Compact Flash, Sony Memory Stick, and SecureDigital. You dont even need to have a computer to use this printer. This printer has several other advantages over its little brother the 7350. The 7350 has the ability to utilize the new HP ink cartridges. Unfortunately, it only holds two of the three at a time. This means you have to swap them out when you print text or photos. The 7550 has a slot that holds all three. Another nice feature is that the new black cartridges are pretty [inexpensive] in comparison to previous black ink tanks. The printer can make borderless 4x6 prints pretty well. My only real reservation about the current HP line is the lack of brightness of the ink. Even the photo black can be a bit muddy. The 7550 prints quality pictures, but the convenience is the key feature. There are better photo printers on the market, but this one combines really decent pictures with the durability and the convenience associated with HP.