Customer Reviews

HP - Photosmart 8750 Professional Photo Printer

5 star:		(4)
4 star:		(0)
3 star:		(1)
2 star:		(3)
1 star:		(2)

 

 

I am a serious amateur photographer who has displayed his work in corporate galleries and sells at art shows and online. I have used the Epson printers (2200, 1280) in the past to make my prints. While these printers do make excellent prints, the frustration I have always experienced has been in the color management end of printing. I've spent upwards of $80 a piece for professionally created icc profiles and even bought the ImagePrint RIP program in my attempts to obtain the perfect prints. While these solutions did work out to my satisfaction, they were an extra cost over and above the cost of the printer price. I always felt that if I was going to pay $600+ for a printer, that it should produce a great print right out of the box.

The 8750 does just that! This is because the color-management is done for you in the driver when using the HP papers. This printer works as well as my Epson 2200 did without the fuss. The HP 8750 gives me perfectly neutral B&W's with great detail in the shadows and no blow-out in the highs. It's a printer that does it's job right without the user needing to learn any of the 'secret techniques'.

You may read that HP forces you to use their papers to get the best quality, but after some Internet research I learned that the surface of HP's semi glossy is similar to Ilford's Galerie Smooth Gloss paper. Galerie Smooth Gloss had been my paper of choice with the 2200 and I had quite a large stock of it in different sizes. Still being able to use the Ilford was one of the major reason I decided to go with the HP over the Epson 2400 upgrade. You will need to use Ilford's icc profile to get good results. But the HP procedure is far less complicated than Epson's and it's well documented in their manual.

In my attempts in the past to create the neutral b&w print, I had used the MIS inking system and turned the Epson 1280 into a dedicated black and white printer. But within a year the nozzles became clogged from the ink. Plus that ink was EXPENSIVE! $45-50/CART! So I ended up buying the ImagePrint software for the 2200. Another $500 spent! All in the quest for the holy grail of the perfect print. Ugh! Then there was the issue of metamerism with the Epson inks. Metamerism is where the prints looked different under different lighting conditions. With the HP, there is absolutely no metamerism! I made one B&W print on the 8750 that look great under the tungsten light of my room. I then ran downstairs to see it in the sunlight and it still looked great. This picture is now hanging in my office at work and under fluorescent light, it still looks great. That's impressive!

One more great thing about printer: the nozzles are built into the actual ink cartridges. So if I need to exchange, say, a dark gray for a black cartridge, I don't have to waste ink by going through a cleaning cycle because I'm installing a new nozzle at
the same time. SWEET!

After researching for weeks I finally bought this printer and I can say after one day with it that I am amazed at the quality it delivers. Better than anything I've ever received from a lab, but then I've never used a lab that gave me what I would call amazing results.

I found mine at the local CompUSA and since Amazon hasn't yet dropped the price significantly lower than a brick-and-mortar store, I bought it there. I usually prefer to get big ticket items like this locally so I can return it right away if the product is damaged or defective. Mine was neither.

I compared this printer to the Canon i9900 and Epson R1800 and here's why I decided on the HP:

* Ethernet built-in and all printer status functions are available via a standard web browser interface;
* The built-in display on top of the printer can control many functions including cleaning and testing, and it gives a real-time display of the ink levels in the three different cartridge locations;
* straight-thru paper path;
* Photo Grey ink cartridge that uses black and two levels of grey for (hopefully) superior B&W prints;
* print nozzles are replaced with each ink cartridge replacement (never a clogged head!);
* the satisfaction I've had with other HP products.

The other printers each have some of these features, but neither of them has all of these.

The only other printers I have used in the past were Epson el-cheapo models and the print heads clogged all the time, so I was really worried about getting another printer that may have even the slightest chance of clogging. If the heads on this printer do clog beyond the point at which a simple cleaning will fix it, just pop in a new cartradge and the problem is fixed.

Now, I've read that many users of Canon and Epson printers got amazing results right out of the box, but I didn't, and it was all my fault. Since I've never had a "real" photo printer before, I didn't have a proper color workflow on my computer. My monitor is calibrated with Mac OS X "Tiger's" built-in calibration tools and I really had no idea what I was doing when I first tried printing with this new printer, so the first pages were less than stellar. I stayed up for a few hours past bedtime to read the web articles on setting up a color workflow and how to use the color preferences in Photoshop CS and by the time I went to bed I was pretty bleary-eyed to say the least, so I gave up and got some sleep.

After a good night's rest and a little more reading and experimenting, I finally hit on the perfect workflow and now I can't believe how beautiful the prints are! Even without a hardware-calibrated monitor I am getting almost exactly on paper what i see on-screen, and that is just incredible. I've thrown some pretty tough images at it and each one has come out perfect. Even the B&W prints are better than those that were printed on B&W paper from a photo lab.

I've never actually seen a 13" x 19" print until today and I'm hooked. I can tell you I'm going to be spending a lot of money on big paper in the future and I may need to add more walls to my place. :)

For an experienced user with a managed workflow, I can see that setting up this printer and getting immediate results would be a snap. If you are using a Mac with OS X "Tiger," you won't even need to install anything on the computer - the OS has the printer drivers and paper profiles already installed. And if you have a network all you have to do is run an ethernet cable from the router/hub to the printer and look for the printer in the Printer Setup Utility. Mine showed up as soon as I opened the utility window. (I can't see how anyone who is serious about using their compuiter as a creative tool would use anything but a Mac.)

The only aspect that I would change at this point would be the use of three ink cartridges for the nine ink colors. In a perfect world, there would be nine cartridges like the separate tanks of the Epson and Canon. That's the only thing I can think of right now, but if I come up with any others I will try to come back and update this review or post another.

The photosmart 8750 produces exquisite photos with sharp clear details, amazing transitions especially in blue skies, and real neutral black and white. The 9-ink system produces the colors I want out of the box, but I can also use ICC profiles for extra control. On glossy paper, the dye-based ink creates beautiful depth in the image without gloss differential issues. When printing black and white, only ink from the gray cartridge is used, producing true black and white prints that rival any other method I have used. With the deep blacks, the black and whites are particularly stunning on the HP satin paper. Overall, this printer produces fantastic prints and I love seeing my work in 13x19 inches!

I have had this printer for 2 years with no problems and had been very happy with its performance. However, bought a new PC with windows vista and after countless hours wasted on line with HP, I now find out it does not print BORDERLESS as it is not compatible with WINDOWS VISTA. I'm angry that HP wasted my time and has not solved this issue. Do not BUY if you use Windows Vista.

As a former professional photographer, a printer's performance as a photo processor is really where the rubber meets the road.

I shoot Nikon pro-level cameras and lenses, both film and digital. I have a Canon 9950F dedicated print scanner, a Nikon CoolScan negative/slide scanner, and an HP 8750 as a dedicated printer for larger format photo prints. I use Photoshop, Lightroom, DNG Converter, and other top-end photo software. The quality of my photo prints is absolutely crucial to me artistically.

I had a Canon i9900 printer, which made great prints in non-archival inks; not acceptable. The Vivera inks used in the 8750 will last over 100 years when used on HP's Premium Plus papers, and the unit yields stunning prints. Image quality is as good as one gets from a lab.

The printer interfaces beauutifully and reliably with my computer system (a periodic problem with the Canon, I might add), a desktop running XP Media Center Pro. Absolutely no glitches at all.

I have to say, I love this printer, and strongly recommend it.

I have had this printer for two or three years. I work as an fine arts photographer and part-time portraitist, and I recently "upgraded" to Vista. (Bought a new computer.) The software included with the new drivers for Vista is just horrible, and offers no control over the printer. My problems, like those of some other reviewers, include: paper jams, bad print quality, inability to match printer to monitor. None of this happened before with XP. I could solve this, I guess, by creating a dual boot-- but that's just more trouble, and I have no guarantee that it would work. I guess I'll start shopping again, but now for an HP. Maybe Canon or Epson.

HP has decided *not* to update the 8750 driver to support Vista. Borderless printing and color profiling do not work. They want me to purchase a new printer rather than providing support for the one I already have. This is corporate HP when it is worst. I cannot recommend HP to anyone.

I bought this printer from Amazon two years ago. It works and prints beautifully and the features (networking, card slots, photo blue and photo black ink availability) are wonderful. Occasionally it fails to pick up paper but cleaning the dust off the rubber rollers fixes that in short order. However, I was forced to purchase a new computer with Vista when my XP machine died. I loaded the Vista driver but the printer does not work well at all under Vista. It cuts the bottom inch off of 8.5x11 pages and puts 1/2-inch borders on the bottom and right side of 4x6 or 5x7 photos. HPs solution is to use 8.5x11 photo paper and cut them down to size but I find this unacceptable since the printer worked flawlessly under XP. Now, when I want to print photos I have to send them to my old laptop that still runs XP and then they print fine...if I didn't have the old laptop I'd be throwing this expensive printer in the trash.

The Photosmart 8750 printer seems to be very well made with some nice features and is easy to setup. However my "test" photos were very disappointing. Using HP Premium Plus Glossy photo paper and the printer set to "best quality" a band would appear across the printout spoiling the print. The banding runs parallel to the print head path and starts around the last 1.25" of the print. The band varies in width and intensity somewhat but and is typically .125" to .50" wide. I increased the print quality to the MAX DPI "Highest quality" and more banding appeared in the print. I then tried printing directly from the compact flash card using the same image and I still had visible banding. I then exchanged the printer for another 8750 a couple of days later with no luck. This time the banding was typically fainter but almost always present to some degree. When image printing from one of its card slots or even from the PC, the rhythm of the print head sudden slows pauses at one side of the page. It then moves to the other side and again pauses and this is repeated for about 9 times around the time the banding happens. The print head will again go back to its normal rhythm and finish printing the image. I removed each ink cartridge and printed the image to see if one of the cartridges was causing the problem. None of seemed to be as there was always banding visible. Also when printing a B&W image the band was present there too. At any rate the print quality would be excellent except for the banding that keeps appearing. I retuned the printer for a refund after speaking to the support technicians.

The 8700 prints a very nice page. But its quirks and inconsistencies doom it to one of the most frustration pieces of hi tech I've owned (and I work in an IT department).

The source of much of the frustration comes from feeding the paper, a seemingly innocuous problem, I admit. But, I've never had a smooth paper feed since I got the printer. It's not a calibration issue, it seems to not know when paper is in, when it should feed it, and it grabs at the paper so quickly that crooked prints are inevitible.

I wish I could write a good rec for this printer, but it's a high maintenance beauty not worth the frustration. Just get something that works and you'll save yourself hours of printer set up frustration in the course of your life. Considering there's so much competition, why bother with this product...