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This is one of the least expensive print costs we’ve come across, so do shop around for consumables. In mitigation for this cheapskate approach, we found the Photopack for £15.04, so the cost per print comes out at 10.7p. The HP110 cartridge offers 55 prints, while the 110 Photopack is capable of 140 prints.

Given that one of those prints is required for mandatory printer calibration, you get just nine before having to go out and buy a ‘regular’ cartridge. HP has succumbed to a mean streak, including a ‘starter’ cartridge rated at just 10, 15 x 10cm prints, presumably fewer if you’re printing at 7 x 5 inches. The printer does just as well with images at 7 x 5 inches as at the default 15 x 10cm.

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For best results, you should use HP’s Advanced Photo Paper, though we also produced acceptable results using Premium Plus paper. Colours are bright, but natural and the three-colour cartridge does well in reproducing dark and light tints. Our test images showed reasonable levels of foreground detail, as well as good shadow detail and very good colour transitions. Print quality, in typical HP style, is pretty good.

Hp photosmart a646 Pc#

Leave all print and quality settings on automatic, as most people will, and it takes just over 1:30 to print from a PC or a PictBridge printer, though printing from a memory card is marginally quicker. The headline print speed of 27 seconds for a 15 x 10cm photos, while achievable, is around a minute shorter than what you normally see. You can do a lot, without needing access to any kind of computer and the touch screen control is intuitive, though building in gesture recognition, as on the iPhone, would improve things still further. You can now add captions to a photograph, too, using an on-screen keyboard, in alphabetical rather than QWERTY order, and even choose different font sizes, colours and positions. Effects include red eye and pet eye retouching – animal eyes tend to reflect in blue or green, rather than the human red. The company has expanded on the range of effects and creative projects you can achieve, using just the stylus and the printer. You can operate the touch screen with your finger, but HP also provides a stylus and even a little ‘inkwell’ to store it in, while working on a batch of images. We reckon it would be a good selling point for just about any USB-based printer.

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It’s ideal for a portable machine like this, as you can plug it into almost any Windows PC and print photos from the computer, immediately.

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The driver is held in the printer’s firmware and copies and installs as soon as you plug the printer in.

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Windows recognises it and downloads all the necessary software from the printer. The first inkling of this is the complete lack of a support CD.Īll you do to set the printer up for PC printing is plug it into a USB port. Installation isn’t normally something anybody pays much attention to, but the Photosmart A636 has been re-engineered. It’s not often we get to write the words ‘this printer is radically different in the way it installs’. While this is technically correct, as this is the diagonal of the touch screen, the LCD display behind it is only 85mm and has a large, black border around it, with six illuminated icons for things like scrolling through images and navigating menus. It’s the top of the printer which shows the most innovation as it uses what HP refers to as a 120mm touch screen. We know, because we didn’t have any 18 x 13cm blanks and cut some down from A4 sheets of HP Advanced Paper… and they wouldn’t fit the Photosmart A636. We say 13cm, as HP claims the machine can print 18 x 13cm photos, but in reality it’s 7 x 5-inch, smaller by several millimetres in both directions. It has a cover that opens at the back to take up to 20 photo blanks loaded nearly vertically and a front cover which folds down to reveal four memory card sockets and one for PictBridge, as well as a wider than normal 13cm slot for prints to feed out from. While at first sight it looks like any of the other, toaster-inspired dedicated ink-jet printers the company has produced in the last couple of years, on closer inspection, it includes a couple of spectacular improvements over what’s gone before.Ĭoloured in black and light grey the design follows the HP tradition. HP’s Photosmart A636 could just be the most innovative photo printer we’ll see this year.