Love it | HP Photosmart Pro B8850 Professional Photo Printer (Q7161A#B1H)

WARNING! | HP Photosmart Pro B8850 Professional Photo Printer (Q7161A#B1H)

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	• HP Photosmart Pro B8850 Professional Photo Printer (Q7161A#B1H) Hewlett Packard Hewlett Packard average customer review:based on 12 reviews view larger image
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highly recommended

Great Printer

I'm happy with this printer. I wanted a 13 x 19" printer and this one fit my budget. For me it's a long over do upgrade from my smaller HP 8250, which still prints beautiful prints. I've had no problems using it with Vista...I had it up and running in no time. Since I have PCS3, I let Adobe manage the colors for the printer and the prints are beautiful using Epson photo paper most of the time and other times HP photo paper.

Love it

This is my first experience with large format printing. This is impressive. After setup and some time on the learning curve, the printer is everything I wanted. Sharp, accurate, great color. The ink is expensive, but the pictures look great. A great time to get into the big picture.

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WARNING!

I have had this printer for about a week. I have made some incredible prints on it that I could probably be able to matte and sell. Color accuracy is absolutely amazing. This is a higher up printer, so you can find ICC profiles for most papers at the HP website or at the paper maker's site.

Why did I title this warning? This printer has a driver bug. It's a fairly common bug, but it has to do with color management, and you can work around it in Photoshop CS3 by allowing the printer to manage the colors. This put me off, and to some professionals, this is a major issue. The B9180, which is about $100 more, has not had this issue.

If you do not heed this warning, you will get black & yellow prints, and you will be very mad that you spent $500.

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The B9180's Little Brother

Buy the B8850 and save about $125! What does the B9180 have that the B8850 doesn't?

1. And LCD status display
2. Built in Ethernet port
3. A metal paper tray
4. Can't print on quite as think paper

If you can live without those things (and I can) then save yourself the extra money and get the B8850. It is essentially the same printer...perhaps even a little better as it has benefited from whatever refinements and upgrades came after the B9180 (like the sleep mode).

I have both and they are great printers. The B9180 is at work and I have the B8850 in my home office. It is probably the best hi-end home photo printer I have ever owned, and I've owned some very nice Epsons as well. Quality is on par with them or better, but what I like best is the reliability. I have yet to have a clogged head or similar printing issue. It produced excellent photo reproductions right out of the box and I have yet to be disappointed. Build quality is phenomenal, almost as good as the tank-like B9180. Printing is quiet and fast. The detail and quality are on part with the outsourced photo printing companies. The inks and papers (you can use quite a variety from plain to fine art) are expensive, but no more so than with other printers and I have found the Vivera inks last longer before running out. I am using printing under Mac OS X 10.5.3 and have had no problems. I concur with the other pros laid out by the other reviewers.

So, what are the caveats?

The paper jams occasionally, or does not spool into the paper feed until it is reset. That is nothing serious though. On some papers, the prints can look a little flat and the colors fade when viewed at an extreme angle. Again, nothing too serious -- most people won't notice. The software interface is a little clunky, but once you get used to it, it has some very nice options and is easy to use. It sometimes intrudes with error messages but not enough to overly bother me.

Otherwise, it is an excellent, reliable machine. Super for the photographer or graphic designer that wants to output archival quality prints at home.

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Produce archival, professional-quality photos up to 13 x 19 using 8 individual high-capacity HP Vivera pigment inks. Breakthrough color consistency makes it easy for serious photographers to take their photo and fine-art printing to the next level.nts and can output them economically without sacrificing the quality of the original image. The most frequent uses of the HP PhotoSmart photo printer include photo enlargement, cropping, red-eye elimination, scratch removal, replication of snapshots, and the creation of greeting cards and other novelties. These uses require the support of a wide variety of media sizes. These media sizes include a wide variety of media types, like photo weight papers (photographic glossy or photographic matte), special project papers, transparency, and a calendar kit. A new "straight-through" paper path facilitates media types that are too thick for traditional curved paths.

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reviews: page 1, 2, 3

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