HP Photosmart Plus All-in-One Printer

Jane Britcher

at 8:54 pm

I bought this printer very recently after buying a Canon Pixma printer in a sale last year then found it wasn’t compatible with Vista. I am not a whizz kid with a computer these days but did manage to set up the printer and wireless connection to it without hassle or professional help. The quality of the print is clear and crisp and the photos are wonderful. I have already looked into the prices of the photo paper and ink cartridges, but after sourcing them here on Amazon, I won’t be bothering with places like PC world! I recommend this printer very highly.
Rating: 5 / 5

A. K. Crawford

at 10:31 pm

I bought this to replace another HP printer as I want to print my own 6×4 photos and this one has a separate tray, plus scanning and A4 printing capabilities.

SO impressed with the ease of set up, the quality of the printing and the vibrancy of the colours.

Scanning documents couldn’t be easier and HP have upgraded the software to make it possible to scan a “several” page document into a several page PDF.

Excellent. Can’t recommend it highly enough.

Rating: 5 / 5

Mike

at 3:30 am

This is a pretty good printer-scanner combination – I’d shied away from them in the past thinking that it would be a compromise of both, but actually this works very well, with good quality printing and scanning. It actually calls itself the Photosmart Plus B209a-m if that helps at all. There are only four cartridges rather than the five or six that photo printers sometimes have, but that doesn’t seem to have any implications for print quality on photo paper. One point to be aware of is that the unit is a little slow to get going – it takes a couple of minutes to wake up fully and complete all the diagnostics, etc, during which time it describes itself as offline. But there again, it takes me considerably more than a couple of minutes to wake up fully most mornings so perhaps I shouldn’t complain!

So why only four stars instead of five? Well, it’s the installation process that loses the star. This is a wireless unit, and for some people the reason why they want a wireless printer is for the very practical reason that there isn’t enough space to easily hook a printer up to a USB or Ethernet cable. But to configure this unit you have to hook it up to your computer with a USB cable (which is at least supplied). It’s a great shame that it couldn’t just hook up using Wi-Fi and configure itself like that.

My other gripe is that you get the usual bloatware from HP – oh for the days when all you needed was the printer drivers! Still, you can opt to not install some of the stuff. My first attempt at installing the software came to a grinding halt and just froze everything. I suspect that was because I had Norton AV running in the background. I disabled Norton and had another stab at it and it all semed to work this time. The firewall didn’t seem to be a problem.

Installing the software on a second computer was much easier, and didn’t involve the USB cable at all, but I disabled Norton from the outset.

HP seems to be a little coy about whether its equipment runs 100% satisfactorily in Windows 7, but this certainly does – we use the 64-bit version and it has all of the functionality we expected of it.

It’s still early days for us, but everything seems to be OK. The previous printer died after about 14 months of not doing very much, so at some point during the next 12 months we will visit hp.co.uk and extend the warranty for a couple of years, which actually seems good value for money. In the meantime, if we hit any horror stories I shall be back!
Rating: 4 / 5