Mac Creative > Reviews > A3 colour photo printers > Photosmart Pro B9180

Photosmart Pro B9180

Photosmart Pro B9180
  • Manufacturer: HP (http://www.hp.co.uk)
  • Pros: Superb quality prints, vivid colour, individual ink cartridges, removable print heads, easy to set up, prints to a wide range of media
  • Cons: Short power cable, printer is front-loading making the straight path option for thicker media more arduous than it should be, long initial calibration
  • Price: £499
  • Star rating: 0

Like many of the printers on test, the HP Photosmart Pro B9180 supplements the traditional cyan, magenta, yellow and black inks with a range of in-between colours, including grey, light cyan and light magenta. These pigment inks, under the Vivera brand name, are designed to remove banding in areas of smooth colour and to accurately reproduce skin tones, which are normally difficult to match. Each colour is supplied as eight individual ink cartridge and pairs of cartridges share one of the four removable print heads.

The print heads and ink are fairly quick to install in the unit. They come supplied with cotton swabs to clean any residue before being inserted into the printer, which they do with a satisfying plastic click. The ink cartridges are uniquely shaped making it difficult to get them in the wrong order, and, furthermore, the spaces for them are colour-coded and marked with abbreviations.

However, the supplied power cable – a regular kettle lead – was ridiculously short, measuring no more than 30cm, which meant the printer had to be tested on the floor as from table height the cable simply wouldn’t reach the socket. Our opinion of the device took a further dip when the printer proceeded to go through a 45-minute calibration cycle while it fine-tuned the print heads. If you need to hit the ground running, this is not the printer for you, and you may find the glacial pace of its initial set-up frustrating in the extreme.

Luckily, when the printer finally announced it was ready to start churning out prints, the results were worth waiting for. It’s not the fastest printer in the round-up – thinking hard about what it’s doing before cranking out prints at a leisurely pace – and it’s accompanied by whirring and clicking, which is annoying if the printer is sat next to you. However, the prints are phenomenal, with rich, vibrant detail and dots that were impossible to see with the naked eye. If speed is not an issue for you, and you have a longer power cable lying around, the quality of the output is second to none.

This product is part of our A3 colour photo printers group product review. Other products in this group are:

 

Canon Pixma Pro9000

  • Editors ChoiceStar rating: 0

 

Stylus Photo R2400

  • Star rating: 0

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