HP Wants You to Print More Pictures

The stylish and affordable Photosmart A826 makes printing photos long stuck inside your digital camera a breeze

by Aaron Ricadela

Editor's Rating:

The Good: Uniquely styled printer produces rich, clear photo prints right from your digital camera

The Bad: Pricey prints; printer cable not included, so connecting to a PC will cost extra

The Bottom Line: If you're armed with the right ink and paper, printing vivid snapshots is a breeze

Reader Reviews

So many digital snapshots, so few to stick to the fridge. Many consumers still print only a fraction of their digital images (BusinessWeek.com, 6/9/08), largely because of the hassle and iffy quality of photos from a home computer and printer. The Digital Age has made it elementary to take scads of high-quality photos, yet done so little to help us print them off.

But things are changing.

Hewlett-Packard's (HPQ) $200 Photosmart A826 printer yields some of the best reproductions of digital photos I've seen, and its touchscreen operation lets users take the PC out of the equation entirely if they choose. The egg-shaped device, meant to look as comfortable in a kitchen as an office, produces clear, bright, richly colored photos. Users control the printer by touching a finger or stylus to its screen to print or add special effects, and it worked nearly flawlessly. A series of sockets on the printer's face makes plugging in a camera or sliding in a memory card a breeze.

The A826 is the first I've tested for a new review series of stylish and feature-packed printers for homes and small offices. I have a few quibbles, including dismay over the need to buy a separate cable to hook the printer up to my PC, and the crash that froze the touchscreen the first time I tried printing from a camera's memory card. But I'd recommend the product for parents, grandparents, and other consumers who want a convenient way to jazz up and print out family snapshots or vacation mementos.

Style and Ease

HP designed the A826 to sit on a kitchen counter or in another part of the house where a PC doesn't usually reside, and for the most part, it's up to the job. The squat device is just 10.5-in. wide and nearly 11-in. tall, and weighs about 5.5 lb. Still, flipping down a front panel that has to be open during printing means you'll need an additional 14 in. of counter space.

Scrolling through functions is straightforward. You switch the printer on with a button on the side, and control the action by touching a finger or the printer's stylus (or even the butt end of a pen) to the printer's 7-in. diagonal screen. Slots in front let users print right from a camera or memory card without bringing a PC into the mix. That alone could nix a lot of the headaches that often lead to pictures sitting unprinted inside consumers' cameras. Leaving a memory card in the slot also prompts the printer to display a slide show of your photos on its screen.

The Photosmart's style would make it a welcome addition to most homes. Done up in a color scheme of light blue and white, it looks like a cross between a robin's egg and a 1990s vintage iMac, reflecting HP's renewed emphasis on stylish products. Flipping up the white panel in front hides the guts—ink cartridge door, memory card slots, and the paper feed—when the printer isn't being used. Printing photos took a minute or two in my tests, depending on size and resolution.

Printing Variety

Setting the printer takes just a few minutes. I plugged it in, opened the front panel, popped in an ink cartridge, and loaded some glossy 5x7-in. photo paper under a door on top. The A826 comes with an "introductory" ink cartridge HP says can print about 10 to 20 5x7's (I got 14) and a few sheets of 5x7 photo paper. After that, you'll need to buy your own supplies.

The Photosmart lets users print photos in three ways: directly from a camera, through a memory card that plugs into the printer, or by way of a PC. Each has its rewards and drawbacks. In my first test, I connected an 8-megapixel HP touchscreen camera to the A826, then used the camera's screen to select photos to print. The results looked great, but I didn't have much control over them.