HP B8350 Photosmart Pro - How Good?

[Phi]

I am aiming to get an A3+ printer and have been looking around and spotted the Hp B8350 at around £215 - which is within my price bracket

I cant seem to find any reviews on it anywhere though.

Does anyone know of any reviews or have experience of it

I generally have used Canon A4 Printers with great results (iP5000 is my latest) - and was wondering how this HP B8350 compares to others especially the new Pro 9000 which is at least £135 more.

Any views etc would be helpful

[DavidW]

The big issue with the B8350 is that it uses cartridges containing three inks each. The colour cartridge is cyan, magenta and yellow, which you use either with a black cartridge or, for photo work, a three ink 'photo' cartridge (which is black, light cyan and light magenta).

The colour cartridges are supposedly available in three sizes. There's also a three ink black and white photo cartridge for black and white work.


The cartridges are not that big - see here. With these triple colour cartridges, you have to throw away the cartridge when one colour is exhausted.

The big colour cartridge for the B8350 appears to be C9363EE (£17.27 from LambdaTek), the photo cartridge appears to be C9369EE (£12.27 from LambdaTek). If the HP coverage figures are right, each 6x4 print costs 18.1p in ink (including VAT) - plus the paper. By comparison, the admittedly more expensive to buy B9180 costs 13.7p in ink (including VAT) at current LambdaTek prices using HP coverage figures; the B9180 uses pigment ink compared to the B8350's dye ink and on the B9180, each ink is in a separate 27ml cartridge.

These comparisons are made using HP Advanced Photo Paper Glossy, which is 6.2p per 15x10 sheet from LambdaTek if you order a 100 sheet pack (Q8692A). In other words, the B9180 comes out at 19.9p per 15x10 (or around twice the price of PhotoBox ignoring the P&P), and the B8340 at 24.3p per 15x10.

Advanced Photo Paper Glossy arguably isn't the best paper for dye inks, but is the only one of HP's mainstream photo paper ranges that is nanoporous rather than swellable, and therefore suitable for the B9180's pigment inks. HP recommend their Premium Plus photo papers for dye ink models like the B8350.


Obviously running costs alone are not a reason to choose between models, but I dislike printers with multiple colours per cartridge and all the printers I still use, with the exception of the portable DeskJet 450wbt which receives only very light usage, uses single colour cartridges or tanks. (My printers are an HP Photosmart Pro B9180 for all photo and plain paper A3 work, a HP Color LaserJet 3800dtn for A4 work, and a Canon i865 which is only really used for CDs since I bought the B9180).


The B8350 uses Vivera dye ink rather than the Vivera pigment ink of the approximately twice as expensive B9180. The B8350 can be had for £200 from LambdaTek (I don't have shares in them, but their prices tend to be amongst the lowest, and I bought my B9180 from them).

However, the cartridges on the B8350 are just too small for my liking. Even if you only print A4, there's 4.16 times the area on an A4 sheet than on 15x10, which means that on HP's figures, the photo cartridge will only last 31 prints. If your prints happen to exhaust one colour quicker than the other two, you may find yourself throwing the photo cartridge away every 20 prints. On A3, things are twice as bad.


If you have the budget, I'd go for the B9180 rather than the B8350. However, if you're a very low user and don't necessarily want a pigment ink machine, the B8350 may be worth a look.



David

[Phi]

Thanks for the comprehensive response - which I will try and digest

At the end of the day I am looking for an A3+ printer that will give good results at a reasonable price - both purchase and price per print - for the occasions when I will need A3 size prints.

Like you I agree that multi-ink cartridges and swapping cartridges for different print requirements is not ideal - I much prefer single ink machines - but if cost is not astronomical then I would consider it

As much as I would like the more expensive 9180 model I cannot justify that expenditure for the amount of times I will need A3. However I may be able to go for the Canon Pro9000 if that is the better overall and more cost effective package

[DavidW]

One thing that may level up the thinking is the amount of ink you get with a B9180 - it's significantly greater than with a B8350 or Canon Pro 9000.


With the B8350, best case is that you get around £30 of ink - in fact, you probably get a small C M Y colour cartridge and a black cartridge, so if you want to print photos you'll have to provide your own LC LM K photo cartridge. For photographic use, you probably get around £14 of usable ink in a C M Y colour cartridge.

With the B9180, you get a full set of eight 27ml cartridges. You lose about 25% of each cartridge to charge the lines in the printer and run through the setup and calibration, so you get £130 of ink of which around £100 worth is available to print with.

With the Pro 9000, you get a full set of cartridges, but they're much smaller than the B9180's cartridges. I'll leave the maths to you.


In other words, when you subtract the value of the ink supplied with the printer from the costs, they're more equal than you may think. There certainly is a price difference remaining, but not as large as the raw pricing suggests.



Meanwhile, I don't understand your comment about not being able to justify the expenditure for the number of times you will need A3. Why not buy one new machine and use it for all your photo printing? I only use my B9180 for photo printing - whether I'm printing 6 x 4 or A3. A3+ machines are usually fine printing 6 x 4, though some of the larger machines aren't able to feed sheets that small.

Unless you have any particular desire to hang on to the Canon (such as CD printing and Pictbridge support, which I don't believe either HP offers, or high glossy output, which the B9180 is not ideal for because of using pigment inks), you could sell your A4 printer.



David