Most Helpful Customer Reviews
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62 of 62 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Perfect Printer for the Part-time Pro, November 19, 2008
As a long-time photographer and graphic designer, I'm pretty familiar with printing in irregular 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 design work.
Overview:)
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The Photosmart B8550 is a large-format printer, capable of printing photographs and posters as large as 13" x 19". If you just want to print 4" x 6" weekend snapshots or if you don't understand why someone would want to print something so large, this is **NOT** the printer for you. This printer is very, very large and is designed primarily for people who want to print very large photographs and digital images.
The Physical Object:)
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The Photosmart B8550 is surprisingly sleek and sexy-looking for a large-format printer, and is significantly smaller and more attractive than the 13x19 printer it will be replacing. The LCD screen is bright and clear, and the printer feels solid and well-built.
The printer's included software integrated quickly and seamlessly with my various photo-editing programs. I was very pleasantly surprised both with how attractive the printer is, and with how well it works with Photoshop, Illustrator, Light Room, Aperture, and iPhoto.
The Prints:)
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The prints from the Photosmart B8550 are nothing short of superb superb. I have printed 3"x5", 4"x6", and 8.5"x11" photographs and have been awed by the quality of the prints I get from this machine. When using the recommended HP Advanced Photo Paper prints of all sizes tested came out bright and clear and were absolutely dry to the touch within seconds of coming out of the printer.
The quality of the prints is so good 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 thought 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 wrong. I don't know if they're using the wrong paper, printing on the wrong side of the paper, or using the wrong settings, but if you use the recommended paper and the correct settings on the printer you will get FABULOUS results.
The Supplies:
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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 put this in perspective, the ink and paper for the large-format Epson printer at my office costs more than twice as much as the supplies for this printer, and the results are markedly inferior.
CONCLUSION:
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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 used. In fact, this is the best printer under $1,000.00 that I have ever used, bar none.
The print quality is nothing short of outstanding, the wide variety of compatible sizes make this a very versatile printer, and the affordable supplies make this printer a joy to use and excellent for hobbyists and photography enthusiasts.
While this may not be the printer for everyone it is an excellent choice for anyone who is interested in printing large photographs, and saving a great 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 big, gorgeous pictures of their favorite shots.
This is the most affordable, highest quality, consumer photo printer I have ever used, and I am constantly surprised by the high quality of the results.
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43 of 48 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Great combination of print quality, speed, and price in a large format photo printer., September 25, 2008
This printer joins my home office in addition to a Canon Pixma Pro9000 large format photo printer and an older Epson RX500 All-in-One printer/scanner/copier. I tend to mainly use 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 used exclusively for photo printing. I am a serious amateur photographer with way more DSLR cameras, lenses, and gear than can be justified given that I have never earned any income from my photography, but I enjoy 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 suppose that is my "payback" for this hobby. My photography interests include people and pets, travel 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 large format photo printer. If your main interest is in printing lots of 4x6 photos or if you are just using a low-resolution digital camera with a tendency to take blurry photos, you may be just as happy using a less expensive photo printer since a 13x19 photo will accentuate the imperfections that were caused by a bad camera shot. Also, if you print more documents than photos, a photo printer like this should not be your only primary printer.
Unlike the Canon Pro9000, the B8550's control panel includes a 2.4-inch color LCD display. It has a surprising variety of built-in functions. You can insert various memory cards into the printer and, just using the control panel without needing to access the computer, perform functions such as:
** Perform "Red Eye Removal" editing on your photos.
** Print out ruled notebook paper, graph paper, music paper, a task checklist, and even a fairly challenging maze.
** Clean and align the printhead.
** Print a "Printer Status Report" 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.
** Set language and country/region preferences for the displays.
** Create and assemble photo album pages, create panorama prints, create wallet and passport photos.
** View and edit photos that are on your memory card. Rotate, crop, resize, perform a "Photo Fix" adjustment (which I did not really ever find to be useful), adjust brightness on the photo, add a "Color Effect" of Black&White, Sepia, or Antique, perform a Print Preview, add a date stamp to the photo being printed.
While the basic photo-editing functions suffice for printing 4x6 photos without needing to use 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 see a much larger screen since the 2.4-inch LCD display 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 device into the printer and immediately start 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 "Start Here" set-up instructions, when you first turn on the printer, the LCD screen also guides you, using short animated 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 consider to be a mechanical design flaw is in the way the output tray and paper extender lock into place 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 place at a raised 45-degree angle, allowing you access to place 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 slight bump of the printer can cause the output tray to slam back down hard to its horizontal position. This happened twice on my printer and, both times, the output tray swung back downward with such force that I had to check that the plastic hinge on the output tray did not break 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 back down with my hand underneath it whenever I load new paper into the main paper input tray.
Towards the end 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 space and system memory. The CD install gives you the option for either a "recommended" express installation or a more manual select-what-you-want custom installation. I selected the express installation, which turned out to be a bad, 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 space used 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 Status Monitor only consisted of one process running that used just a fraction of the memory that all those HP processes required:
E_S4I2K1.EXE 2712KB
So I started to consider what HP applications I wanted to keep and what I wanted to remove. My computer has 2 GB of memory and over 600 GB of disk space, 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 involved in checking for updates for the ArcSoft Print Creations software. I have sometimes used previous ArcSoft software to mainly create greeting cards (especially during the end-of-year holidays), so I wanted to retain the ArcSoft software that was loaded during the CD installation. The B8550 printer also includes a "Creative Projects Guide" booklet that describe how you can use the included ArcSoft Print Creations software to create 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 consuming memory since you can manually start 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 new and updated HP software. But it does not need to be kept always running since I can just manually start it up from the Start menu on a periodic basis. So I used the Windows Registry Editor to delete its "HP Software Update" entry from: HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE:SOFTWARE:Microsoft:Windows:CurrentVersion:Run
The included "HP Smart Web Printing" software lets you selectively gather and edit Web page content 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 Smart Select" button that it adds to your browser's toolbar, and you use your mouse to highlight Web page content that you wanted to collect into a "Clip Book", and from your browser's "Clip Book", you can then print just the portions of various Web pages that you are interested in, instead of printing entire Web pages. A great concept... but I could not get this to work. My Firefox (version 3) browser refused to accept 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 Remove Programs" and uninstalled the "HP Smart 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 buy your ink cartridges and printer supplies at MSRP list price and do not ever shop around for the best price. 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 price, and the only vendor options were either to purchase 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...
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15 of 15 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
If you buy a lot of prints - fire your lab and buy the HP B8550!, September 26, 2008
Let me start the review by stating that this is a PHOTO PRINTER. I emphasize this because a great photo printer is not necessarily a great everyday document printer. If you don't print a lot of photos or color fliers, but print mostly documents, then this is not the right printer for you. Printing simple documents is noisy, slow, 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 remarkable that you literally could fire your photo lab and print all of your photos at home. This printer will quickly pay for itself and save you a lot of money on photo processing.
The physical set up of the printer is easy and intuitive. The print cartridge carrier slipped right in place and the print cartridges are color and shape coded to simplify installation. For some odd reason, HP doesn't include a USB printer cable. This doesn't make any sense to me at all because you have to have one to use the printer and they don't cost that much money. Luckily, I had a spare cable or else I wouldn't have been able to use the printer until making another trip to the store! So be sure to get a USB printer cable.
I use 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 smart enough to alert the user if an inappropriate paper size is selected - a feature that is greatly appreciated! However, one must still remember to choose the correct 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 catch every user error. Check twice and print once!
Enjoy!
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