Use HP's Premium photo papers and print speed drops dramatically. The printer requires a new range of quick drying papers called HP Advanced. There is a catch to printing fast photos. HP has also built in a system that checks ink levels and stops you starting print jobs if you have insufficient ink. Instead, the 8250 uses a new recycling method that HP says allows more of the ink in cartridges to be used in printing. The 8250 does not repeat the maintenance cleaning cycles that most inkjets use, and which waste ink. HP claims there are also ink economies from its new printhead technology. If you use some colours more than others, only the empty cartridges need replacing.
There are six, separate colour inks plus black which gives you the chance to economise. Borderless is the printer's default setting and as well as standard sizes, we had excellent results with borderless large panorama mode, which prints 215 x 610mm photos.
Our test prints were so realistic they could easily have been mistaken for the real thing. The printer's maximum resolution is 1200 x 4800 dpi, not the highest for this type of inkjet, but very, very good. Quality is just as important for photos as speed. A 2.5in colour LCD screen to display photos before printing comes with plenty of controls to select, rotate and zoom pictures. 4 x 6in photo paper and A4 have their own dedicated paper trays. For wireless printing, there is optional Bluetooth. A front PictBridge camera port, rear USB port and card reader compartment enable direct printing from digital cameras and all popular storage cards. It prints A4 text documents in black at around 30 pages per minute and borderless prints in all the most popular sizes. A 4 x 6in print using normal print mode took around 20 seconds and a borderless A4 photo took about two and a half minutes, making it a very quick printer indeed.Īs well as printing fast photos, the 8250 does all the things you would expect of an inkjet printer in this price bracket (recommended price is £149). We tried it out with borderless prints, which always take a bit longer.
Hewlett Packard claims that its new Photosmart 8250 inkjet photo printer produces 4 x 6in photos in under a quarter of a minute. (Pocket-lint) - Fast cars, fast games, now we have fast printers.