Product Reviews

At MacUser we see printers of many kinds and quality levels, so when we say the output quality of the new HP Photosmart Pro B9180 was good enough to make us stop and stare, we mean it is really something impressive. Both the included samples and, more importantly, our own output looked good enough to hang in a gallery, let alone put in front of a fussy client.

But we're getting a little ahead of ourselves here. The Photosmart Pro B9180 is a solid charcoal and silver device; a modern-looking product with clean, functional lines. It is not small, but that's not surprising as it prints up to A3+ (13 x 19in, 32 x 48cm) as well as down to 3 x 5in photo media. It is heavier than we expected, and it feels tough enough to take a certain amount of abuse. It also sports an Ethernet port as well as USB; this is a network-ready printer rather than a single-user device.

It is an eight-colour printer, and because each ink is held in a separate cartridge you can replace just the colours that run out without wasting others. The range covers photo black, matte black, light grey, light cyan, light magenta, and the standard cyan, yellow and magenta as well. Not all colours are used on all media; the matte black ink is a new development meant specifically for matte-finish fine art paper, while the photo black is used with glossy coated papers.

The paper tray is a solidly-built item protruding from the front. Manual feeding of special media is done with a fold-out tray, and can handle stock up to 1.5mm thick. The printer's eight ink cartridges are stored below the LCD and control buttons panel rather than on the moving print head mechanism, with the four print heads themselves being fed from these. The ink level for each colour is shown in the LCD screen when printing isn't taking

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As well as working as a regular printer, the HP installer adds a Photosmart Pro item to Photoshop's Automate menu. This gives you more precise output control when printing from Photoshop.

We tried this printer with several different media types as well as different images and artwork. The supplied matte canvas, Hahnemhle watercolour and Aquarelle art papers were rather more extreme than we normally use, but the printer handled each impeccably. Whether it was laying down blocks of colour and type in an A4 spread proof (with bleeds and printers marks, naturally) or recreating the precise range of greens (from acid to seagreen) of a particular pastels painting for exhibition use, the output was everything we wanted.

The B9180's performance depends in no small part on the speed of the Mac you use with it. HP claims that this product can produce an A3+ page in less than one and a half minutes and small photos in less than 10 seconds. We found that real-world print speeds were noticeably slower, and printing a full A3 high-resolution photo at best photo quality from a Power Mac G4 would regularly take at least 20 minutes. With the right kind of artwork you'll see fast throughput, but for some jobs you'll be able to take coffee breaks between pages. The results are always impressive, but don't see this as a mass-production device.

As long as you bear this in mind you won't be disappointed. Of course, to get the most accurate results you'll need to have a colour-calibrated workflow; you'd profile your screen at least and ideally the printer's output on each media type as well. If you want PostScript output you'll also need to set up a software Rip, too, or use PDF as an intermediary format. But with decent original layouts or images you'll get decent output whether or not your screen is calibrated.

At well over £400 including VAT, the B9180 it isn't a cheap option. If you print many full-A3 page images you'll also end up going through a fair number of ink cartridges. It is obvious that the Photosmart Pro B9180 is aimed more at the creative professional than the average computer user; it is a high-quality product meant for demanding users. If this sounds like you and if your projects could do with top-notch desktop printing or you want to be able to produce gallery-quality prints with archival-grade inks, get your chequebook out.