HP Photosmart Pro B8550 printer ink cartridges

The HP Photosmart Pro B8550 printer allows the amateur photographer a superior finish using the five individual ink cartridges suitable for this printer. All these inkjet cartridges are available in standard HP364 form and the better value, high capacity HP364XL format, all shown here at discount prices from Cartridge Concept.

HP Photosmart B8550 Review

HP's on a roll with its high-end photo printers-the products made to print at up to supertabloid size (13 by 19 inches). The HP Photosmart B8550 Photo Printer is yet another outstanding appliance which is directed at high-end customers.

The B8550 employs dye-based inks and instead of being designed to print onto a variety of fine art papers, it's essentially restricted to using HP's superior photo paper. Inside those limitations, having said that, it prints stunning output at big size.

The B8550 in addition contains a handful of consumer-oriented features like the capability to print straight from a USB key, memory card, or PictBridge camera, and also an LCD to help you to preview pictures before printing. Still another distinction is that although there's limited reason to get the B8550 if you don't wish to use it with regards to photos, you can make use of it as a standard home printer as well.

The B8550's principal paper tray can take 40 sheets of photo paper or 125 sheets of plain paper, which is an acceptable volume for a home printer. Additionally, another photo tray can hold as much as 20 sheets of photo paper, although it is restricted to a maximum paper size of 5 by 7 inches.
Setting up the B8550 is straightforward. It is a bit physicaly larger compared to many inkjets, at 7.1 by 22.8 by 15.3 inches (HWD), but it weighs just 16.7 pounds. Simply look for a spot for it, take away the packing materials, hook up the power cord, and then click in the five ink cartridges (including both a matte black along with a photo black). Next run the automated installation program and then hook up by USB cable once the program notifys you to. I tested the printer with Windows XP, however it additionally includes drivers intended for Vista and also Mac OS 10.4 and later.

The B8550 is amongst the speedier tabloid-size inkjets I've examined. The overall time on our business applications suite ended up being 13 minutes 32 seconds. The B8550 in addition scored well on the photo suite, averaging 1:33 for each 4-by-6 and 2:31 for each 8-by-10. The times for supertabloid photos ranged from 5:43 to 6:55 per picture.

As I have already suggested, the picture quality while using the HP Photosmart B8550 printer ink cartridges is actually exceptional. The one exception was a monochrome photograph, that demonstrated moderate tints, with diverse colour tints at diverse shades of grey.

Graphics quality was basically definitely in the same league. I saw a bit of visible dithering in the form of slight graininess in some output, however nothing I'd personally call objectionable. Colours were definitely eye-catching and completely saturated, not to mention the unit actually did an effective job with narrow lines, which the majority of machines have difficulties with.

Text output-not this specific printer's principal purpose-on plain paper was basically at the low end of what I hope to observe from an inkjet. More than one half of the fonts in the text tests registered as very easily understandale at 8 points. Fewer than half registered as adequately formed at 8 points, due to a character spacing issue. Nevertheless, though it drops a little short of exactly what you'd probably wish with regard to fully professional quality results, it really is easily adequate with respect to schoolwork and the majority of business use.

The fairly poor text quality might appear to take a bit of the shine off of the B8550, but remember that it is intended as a near-dedicated picture model. It in fact installs with default driver settings for printing pictures upon photo paper. In this particular context, having the ability to operate as a standard printer, and even print text documents in any respect, is really a bonus. The reality is that the mixture of photo quality, speed, as well as large-format printing definitely makes the B8550 a great picture model for the selling price.