Customer Reviews

HP PhotoSmart 8150 Inkjet Printer

5 star:		(11)
4 star:		(3)
3 star:		(4)
2 star:		(6)
1 star:		(5)

 

 

We bought this after a big trip to the UK and Europe to print out my digital pics for my still analog mother. Needless to say, she wants a digital camera very badly for Christmas now.

Its so easy to just pull your memory card from your camera, plug it into the printer and be able to zoom, crop and do basic editing (color balance, etc) right on the printer. We aren't even going to hook it up to a computer, becuase if you're just using it for pictures theres almost no need.

I looked at the 8450 with networking and 8 print nozzles, but didn't think it was worth $80 more. Like I said, we arent even hooking it to a printer, let alone our network, and frankly I do not know how noticeable 2 more print nozzles are going to be when the pictures look this spectacular in the first place.

Print speed is surprisingly fast, as I've been seeing 30seconds for a borderless 4x6.

I definitely recommend it

I recently got this printer as a gift, and I have had great luck printing more than 250 4"x6" prints, some on 8.5x11, and some on Kodak 4"x6.25" stock (leaves a little handle for your prints). The pitcures are very good, with only a little bronzing, which seems to make the prints jump at you. The images were from a 5 megapixel Canon, so they were pretty rich.

I printed from 200dpi images from PhotoShop, Windows Picture and Fax Viewer, and HP Image Zone (or whatever it is.) Windows is the best of the three for batch jobs. The HP software was klunky, as always. Let's face it, they are not software developers.

I also printed some retouched black and whites, and there was some graining with enlargements, but the overall effect was very good. There was some color artifacting (pink or blue tint) to the black and whites, but I just found out HP makes a grayscale photo cartridge for this printer, so I will get that and I am sure there will be no extra colors.

I printed to both glossy and matte, and the images were excellent. With heavy blue saturations the ink takes longer to dry, so watch out you don't smudge your skies or other blue backgrounds.

The printer does go through cartridges, though. I have replaced the photo cartridge (black, light cyan, light magenta) three times for about 300 prints, so 100 each (4x6) is probably the rule of thumb. It also uses a true cyan, yellow, magenta cartridge which doesn't seem to run out as fast. Color reproduction is excellent while the ink lasts.

I've been hemming and hawing over which photo printer to by since I bought my digital camera. I didn't have enough sense to think it through and by the scanner, printer, and camera all at the same time. I thought I would just use the Kodak kiosk like i've been doing. That lasted about a week.
The three main contenders were the HP photosmart 8450 because it was highly rated and had 8 ink cartridges, and memory card slots
The HP photosmart 8750 because it printed up to 13"x19" and it had the memory card slots,
The canon i9900 because it was supposed to be the absolute best for the serious amateur had 8 ink tanks and printed large, downside though, no memory card reader.
So why didn't I buy any of these and instead got the HP photosmart 8150? It's quite simple actually for two ink tanks less i.e. six instead of eight, it cost 100.00 dollars less where I bought it or 60.00 dollars less on Amazon. I got it home, pulled it out and installed the software. For some reason you have to install the software first then connect the printer. I was up and running in 10-20 minutes, (there's alot of software it comes with photo editing software and scrapbook assistant)plugged in my SD card and printed my first photo five minutes later (I was playing with the menu, it's NOT slow). You can edit right on the printer screen theres some fun effects and borders that you can do. Color was amazing worked right the first time. And the really cool thing is that it has two trays built in. One is for letter sized paper and the other is for 4"x6" photo paper you just slide a switch to engage the photo paper.
Some things to consider:
-Blasted thing doesn't come with the 2.0 USB cord I had to steal the cord off of my new CanoScan.
-It takes a LOT of room on your hard drive 600MB yes over half a gig.
-It's big it's about twice the size of my normal printer
-If you're going to be doing a lot of black and white printing, the gray ink cartridge HP 100 is NOT included
-It does come with photo paper
-It does have memory card capability.
-One other thing, this may be a duh thing to those in the know, but for a newbie, when you are putting the photo paper in the printer it goes glossy side DOWN with the tear tab towards you. I just slapped it in there and ended up printing on the wrong side, which actually made for a neat effect but you do want to print on the correct side.
I highly recommend it. Glad I didn't buy the Canon i9900; right now that would be gilding the lily.

This printer is a workhorse right out of the box. After going to Target and trying to use their "Photo Print Station", I gave up trying and purchased this printer on a whim. I needed to get some shots off to relatives who do not believe in using Ofoto.

From the start I was impressed with its speed, clear quality, and features. I could take photos one moment, insert my digital card into the printer, edit them, and print them on the fly.

I was a long time EPSON fan and was impressed with HP's leap in their user interface and technology. The price of the ink, paper, and printer make this purchase a great investment for its nominal cost. Other printers with the same technology usually get the consumer with the price of ink and paper. The INK cartridges last until the very last drop and are go much farther than the EPSON brands.

For those of us who have already invested in a PC with multimedia capabilities (large memory, HD, and software), this is a great addition to your collection without the big chunk into your wallet.

However, it does have some limitations.

1.) Paper Jams using the 4x6 paper can be daunting, it took me a while to manually fish out my 4x6 paper to clear the last jam.

2.) The printer only allows up to 15 sheets of any HP photo premium paper at a time without jamming, this means that if you are printing a large batch of shots, you need to stay by your PC or printer to constantly feed.

3.) You need to stick with the VIVATRA inks and HP photo paper to keep the high quality. As with other companies, it is a marketing tool that promotes their high quality and fade resistant promise. Luckily, Amazon offers their products for a reasonable price, but you need to wait weeks for them to arrive.

4.) You are limited to 8x10 as your largest print. My EPSON 1280 printed banners and large 16x20 prints. However, if you are a member of companies such as OFOTO, Snapfish, or Shutterfly, you can print send off for those sizes.

Other than that, I would purchase this printer again. I make photo memory quilts and originally invested in EPSON 5 years ago because of their promise for ink resistancy.

However, I am happy to say that HP now can provide the same effort without the steep price. As a result, I was able to purchase a replacement printer and keep up with my craft.

Great quality, easy user interface, and best price.

Clearing up redeye from photo cards is a major reason to choose the HP PhotoSmart 8150 and 8450 over HP's 7760 or all Canon or Epson printers.

In looking for a printer for my daughter for Christmas, I settled on HP PhotoSmart 8150 for its size, convenience, and especially for the redeye removal from photos. However, when I tried to remove the redeye from a photo of my granddaughter on an SD card, the whole printer froze with a yellow screen and an error code (TBD). I did this at Office Depot.

I went to Office Max and Best Buy to find the same result, trying to remove redeye on three different 8150s. Of interest, the same thing also occured with the 8450.

Using the same photo on the SD card, I was able to remove redeye on comparable HP models 375, 2355, 2610, and 2710 in different stores.

Once the printer locked up, pressing the cancel and on/off buttons did not clear the problem. I had to unplug the power to restart the 8150 and 8450 printers.

Interestingly, the small HP 375 seemed to use the same algorithm as the 8150 and the 8450. This algorithm showed the photo when checking for redeye and cleared it (on the 375) or stated "No redeye detected" on photos without redeye. The other printers showed a "working" generic screen and did not state clearly if redeye was removed or not.

I will amend this review when I find the error code.

12-9-04: The error code for the HP 8150 is 881921DA or 8819217A, as seen on two different machines.

I used use HP printers and very unhappy with the HP printers.
Why, because they engineered worng. You have to feed the paper always from the front and if you put thick paper it will jam or bad print job.
I don't speak English well, however getting better. LOL
Anyway, Please don't buy untill HP improve thier product. While you use HP printer may be you want to print birthday card that designed by you and use thick business card. HP printer can not handle thick paper like thick card paper ex...
However, there is other product form not HP company, that can feed your paper from the back side, therefore the thick paper can easily go though printer without jamming paper or bad printer job.

I am not against HP products but expecially printer. I just can not shot my mouth close, because the design is real bad.

Another bad design is printer ink catrige. The the color ink catrige uses three different color. The problem is you have to get rid of whole ink catrige just one color is run out. and when you trying to buy in the market, it's very expensive to replace it. Why we have to throw it away all we need to change one color whitch run out?

I hope you got idea from my review about HP printers. My mean all of them. I tryed most HP printers to print out my birthday card which is thick paper but not that thick. LOL

However, HP printer has good printer quailty but, I just want them to improve.

Thanks for reading my review.
sorry about my spelling, I had real difficult time to write this review.

I had to get a printer quick after mine just konked out. I did some research and this looked like the best deal for it's features. I love it. It prints terrific photos, and the regular every day black print is awesome and fast.

This printer has gotten little use in a year and a half due to many small problems that were fixable, but annoying. Now the print cartridge cradle is jammed. After exhausting the few suggestions offered in the manual and on line by HP, I called customer service and was offered the chance to pay $30 to speak to a technician...with no guarantees of success, and no credit towards any needed parts or labor. Maybe I'm spoiled, but with four HP printers and a fax in the house I somehow expected more.

I'm throwing it out.

As others have specified, things are flimsy. I've had this printer now for 389 days. And as the tech support person I talked to this evening, there is only a 365 day warranty...

As others have said, it was the color cartridge that is no longer being recognized.

I love(d) this printer... Decent software. Extremely happy with the prints. But after finding out that my "photo" printer is essentially now just a really fast (and that isn't really true with it in ink-backup mode) text printer, I'm not really thrilled with it anymore.

Hopefully there's someone on eBay ready to buy the ink that I just dropped a gold mine on trying to debug this problem tonight...

A small plastic part broke off from the tri-color cartridge holder, and now the little metal wire in that cartridge holder area no longer is in the correct position. When I put a tri-color cartridge in, the printer says the color cartridge is bad. The printer now will only print with the black or photo cartridge in--but either way the prints come out black and white. I really loved this printer until this happened. I was concerned about the cheap feel of the cartridge holders and the snap down latch on the cartridges--but I thought it would be ok since it was made by HP. I am going to miss this printer (I am still upset that it broke!) and I was careful with it.