Customer Reviews

HP PhotoSmart P1000 Inkjet Printer

5 star:		(20)
4 star:		(18)
3 star:		(4)
2 star:		(8)
1 star:		(9)

 

 

I think we all agree that the quality of the actual prints is top class, and it is difficult to tell the difference between a "shop print" and what comes out of the HP P1000, especially if you invest in the top quality paper - HP Premium Plus Photo Paper - Glossy.

Installation was problem free, but then again I took the time to page through the (VERY POOR!) manual. I can see that if one does not read the instructions, trouble may loom ahead. HP should definitely work on this, as these days one should only have to plug in the power cable, the USB cable, and put the installation CD in the CDROM drive.

The printer comes with both USB and parallel ports (but no cables!), so those of us running Windows NT could use the printer. Note however, that HP recently posted USB drivers for Windows NT on their website, so the parallel connection may become useless.

It's great that the printer has built in compactflash and smartmedia card readers - that would generally save you a good $50 on buying a USB memory card reader for your digital camera.

Now for the problems: No matter what I do, the 4 by 6 paper in the special 4 by 6 tray is never drawn in correctly, and all prints are misaligned. A number of other people have had this problem, and as far as I'm concerned the 4 by 6 tray is useless. Second, the rollers and feeders makes very fine scratches all the way down the glossy letter size print, which does spoil the result a little. I am working with HP on this, and anyone with a similar problem or its solution may contact me. Finally, the ink cartridges that come with the printer are "economy" size - that's a poor show from HP.

Finally, I'd love to see 8.5 by 12.5 paper, so that I could print four 4 by 6 prints on one page, saving time and money. Alternatively, paper about 7 inches wide, and say 17 inches long would also be great.

I researched dozens of so-called Photo Printers for a year before this one caught my eye. This is an amazing product for the price, and it's the first to have impressed my wife. The output quality is so close to real photos that we ran out and spent $300 on frames!

My only caveat is that, while the built-in card readers seem like a great idea, the fact is you usually need to process your pictures on a PC to get them looking their best -- before you print. But still, it's super cool to be able to pop a CompactFlash card in this printer, print an Index sheet, click the Save button, and have the pictures copied automatically to your computer.

One other minor gripe is that this printer isn't all that sexy looking on one's desk. Its control panel is a hodgepodge of buttons and curves. I actually preferred the styling of HP's DeskJet 970Cse. It has the same print engine, but instead of the built-in computer it has a duplexer -- which is not nearly as interesting for photo printing. (Note that you pay $100 for the P1100's duplexer -- the only difference from the P1000.) It would be nice if HP offered an even cheaper model without the duplexer or card readers.

This was my first serious foray into photo printing, and I was a little disappointed to discover how fragile inkjet output is. Basically, you can never touch a print on photo paper because it'll be sticky for a while. And if you get any water on it, plan to reprint. The best way to protect your good pictures is to put 'em under glass.

Mechanically, I've experienced a few misfeeds when using the 4x6 photo tray -- and those were with HP's sample 4x6 paper. Epson's cheaper 4x6 paper will not fit the tray without trimming, but amazingly I didn't have any misfeeds with it. My solution was to buy a good paper cutter and print everything on letter size paper.

All in all, this is the printer I'm recommending to friends and family. When I first showed the output to people and asked them to guess how much a printer like that costs, every one of them guessed around $2,000! That got me thinking I should compare the output with HP's color laser printer. And with the exception of a little holographic effect at different viewing angles on pictures from the P1000, I thought the quality was noticeably better than the color laser printer -- at 1/6th the price.

My Epson 640 has just died on me. Needless to say, I was in the market for a new printer. After reading many reviews, I decided to buy the PhotoSmart P1000. I chose this over the P1100 because I didn't need the duplexing capability and it was $100 cheaper. Well, the first photo I tried to print was on normal paper... one word... AMAZING! I then tried the included samples of photo paper and was truly impressed. Just like a photograph. The SmartCard reader worked like a charm... The only thing I found annoying was the USB connection... sometimes it would work, other times I would get errors... I remedied this by downloading the latest drivers and patches for my motherboard (FIC 2013 running an AMD 2-350). No more problems with USB. Finally, I found that the built-in smartcard reader was absolutely incredible... I now use the printer to transfer my photos to the computer. It's very fast! No more slow serial transfers. Overall, I highly recommend this printer.

I've owned my HP P1000 for a year now and I have never experienced ANY of the problems others report in their reviews, which is what prompted me to write one of my own. I print everything---from the very highest resolution 8X10 to the cheesiset cartoon graphics for a letter to a friend, using my P1000. I even printed my own wedding invitations and envelopes. (& I got rave reviews on them!) If it can be printed, I've used my P1000 to print it. I have never had an envelope problem, as others, nor do I have any paper jam problems. The printer is fast and efficient, and turns out a supurb quality print. I do a lot of photography work, as well as graphic design, and this was the most affordable printer for me. And no one asks me if I printed something myself--they are amazed when I say I did. No one believes that I could turn such great quality prints out from my home printer and PC. But you can with this machine--anyone can. It's great.

Bought this printer from Amazon several months ago and thought I should share my thoughts after a few months of printing. I installed the printer without a glitch, via USB. I have used the card readers to read both Compact Flash and SmartMedia cards, it works like a champ and is really pretty quick transfering the files. The printer has a seperate 4x6 photo tray and I use it quite a lot. The quality on the HP 4x6 paper is photo-realistic, and using the HP Premium Plus glossy letter size paper produces the same excellent results. I've printed up to 8x10 and the quality is FANTASTIC! Printing text and regular day-to-day output is quick and the quality is great. I love this printer! I do not have any regrets over purchasing it. I have several friends that now have it after seeing what it can do! Highest rating, state of the art in color inkjet photo production.

Well, I can't help but notice everyone is having problems with this printer. I want to say that I didn't experience a bit of troubles when installing it on my computer. I used USB to try and scrape a little extra performance out of it. At first it was connected directly to my pc but even after purchasing a usb hub, and disconnecting and connecting it all of the time, it still works flawlessly with no driver problems.

The reason why I gave it four stars is because of the envelope feed. I noticed that it did pull one 4x6 picture through a little crooked. It didn't jam though. To anyone experiencing jams with the 8 1/2x11 paper, try adding more paper (at least 25% full). Other than that, This printer is outstanding. Combined with the Sony Cybershot (DSC-S30) set at 1024x768 resolution and using the incredible HPPhotoRet 3-pass technology, You can't even tell that the print out's didn't come from a Photo Shop. It is AMAZING. High quality print outs do tend to take about 2-3 minutes but it is well worth the wait for a full page printout.

I must say that is printer is simply great! I've been using HP printers since the inception of the HP 500C, the very first color inkjet, from there I purchased an HP 660 then most recently had an HP 855, and I can honestly say the HP 1000 blows them all away in terms of photographic reproduction! The fact that it is only $399 and can produce prints equal to and probably surpassing color lasers and dye sublimation printers that costs a lot more certainly says something about HP. Using glossy or photo paper produces prints indistinguishable from the original prints. Even on normal paper there is no detectable banding, which was a problem with the previous HP printers I had. Installation was a snap using the USB port, and print speed compared to my HP 855C is a whole lot faster. There is also the ability to add the duplexer that comes with the HP 1100, a definite plus, but I'm not sure worth $100, unless you do a lot of two sided printing.

I am an amateur photographer (pretty much a hobby in my spare time) Now instead of spending money on reprints and enlargements, I can use this printer with photo paper. The prints are that close to the original! The only thing I've noticed so far that is a bit of a drawback is that it looks like the color ink tends to go fast if you do a lot of full color 8x10 in prints, (at least according to the HP toolbox estimate) and also its a bit noisy when preparing to print, but once it starts its whisper quiet. One other thing is that packaged with the printer is an econo sized black cartridge, (you only get 21 ml of ink versus 42 ml in a standard) although really geared for photos it would have been nice with a full black cart) I haven't really tried it for text yet, but I have a laser printer for that.

Well that's it for me, now I can't wait until I get a good digital camera!

I bought this printer to use with the HP C200 digital camera and find that the prints are great. Being able to insert the CF card and print direct is very useful (especially as the printer is not currently connected to my PC - read on!) I was hoping to use this printer as a replacement for my 3 year old HP DeskJet 820Cse (which still works great but is not good for photos). Unfortunately I have found the PhotoSmart printer to be much slower than my old one for straight black printing. The print speed is OK - it just has to think about it for a long time before starting to print! This may be due to the fact that my PC is 2 years old and the new printer doesn't like it. I also had problems printing labels from Word 97. I am now using my old printer again and will have to get a switch and additional cable in order to use both printers (one for boring stuff and one for photo stuff).

Absolutely beautiful output - you cannot tell the difference between a real photo and one printed with this printer on photo paper. Also works well as an everyday color inkjet printer.

When I was deciding to purchase this printer I looked at the horror stories in these product reviews and figured that most of them were from older hardware incompatibilities and/or novice computer users, and that I wouldn't have as many problems. I'm sorry to say that, that was not the case.

I'm a computer software/hardware quality assurance specialist for a large southren California company. I have an AMD K7 800 mhz system with 256 meg RAM. And connected the printer with the USB connection. My once stable computer was prone to lock-ups and page fault errors immediately after installing the "Photo Smart" software. So I immediately went to the web page and upgraded to the most current version (1.3.1.19). Things got alittle more stable, but still locked up on a regular basis. Then when looking for the other problems that I was having, HP support had the unmitigated gall to infer that 256 meg wasn't enough memory on the machine......

After going thru a few packs of photo paper and the stingy (smallest they make) ink cartridges that came with the printer, I regained my computer stability and found some "secrets" that will allow me to bypass the errors in the horribly coded and error prone "PhotoSmart" software. Let me pass them on:

1. Disable the "sounds" in the "PhotoSmart" software. It causes page faults on most systems.

2. In the "win.ini" comment out (with a ; in the first character) for the "run=hpfsched". (Disabling this restablized the computer.)

3. When you want to print a page of photos. Create the page, save the page and SHUTDOWN the "PhotoSmart" software. Then restart "PhotoSmart" and reopen the page you just created. The page will then print successfully, but not if you don't follow this exact sequence.

Come on HP, you can do better than this !