HP Photosmart 7960 printer

Page 12.

Direct printing and image enhancements.

One of the advantages of printing from within an imaging application is that you can adjust your image to suit your taste. This advantage is lost when you choose to print directly from a memory card, although HP has a number of built in image enhancements that will give some control. On the LCD screen select Enhance Image and you have four choices; Remove red-eye, Photo brightness, Add frame and Add colour effect (Black & White, Sepia, Antique). Lets run a few prints off and see what happens.

My red-eyed monster (in front)	hp are halfway there with this
Brightness +/- 3 stops	Add a frame
Antique	Sepia

The image enhancements work to a reasonable degree. The red-eye didn't meet my expectations, but then I think it would be different from image to image - what if Sophie had red buttons? The brightness adjustment is alright for a quick fix and should sort out most minor problems. On the add a frame feature there are 9 designs to choose from, these are displayed on the LCD with a choice of sixteen background colours. This is for fun use, perhaps a feature I would expect to find on an entry level printer, but not on a top of the range 8 ink printer. Pity there isn't an option to add your own custom frames, that would make it useful for photographers who want to add a logo to a proof image etc. The Add colour effect, especially the Antique, was disappointing, although a useful extra was that you could combine enhancements. I added a -2 stop brightness to the Sepia effect. I should point out that any image enhancements you choose are only applied to the printed file and not the original file.

The direct printing feature relies on the internal processor of the printer and as such may give a reduction in print quality. The printer has 16mb of ram on board to assist with speedy processing. For this next part I have loaded the photo-i/PC Pro test file onto a Compact flash memory card and I will print it so we can see how much quality has been lost. This is a 20mb file and after selecting print size etc. the printer jumped into action within two seconds. The final borderless A4 print has taken six minutes 25 seconds. I have converted the image to b/w in Photoshop as it is just the image quality I want to look at.

Printed via Photoshop	Direct Print sample

The direct print has lost some of the detail, but this is only really apparent when you magnify the image as I have done here. Under normal viewing conditions the print easily equals the print I made via Photoshop. Sophie's skin tones are cooler on the eight ink direct print, on the six ink print they are healthy looking. The cotton reels are lively on the 8 ink and better on the six ink.

Direct Print with six inks	Direct Print with eight inks

The direct printing feature is certainly worth having for 6x4 inch prints, for larger prints I would rather use an image editing application and prepare my files as I want them.

© Vincent Oliver 2003 www.photo-i.co.uk
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