HP Photosmart 7960 printer

Page 17.

The bundled software.

Printers are usually supplied with some form of image management or editing software, this is usually enough to get you productive, but just how useful is this software?

HP Photo &Imaging Gallery is an application that previews folders with thumbnail images, these are generated moderately fast from a hard drive folder but quite slow from a memory card. The application creates a cache file for each visited folder and subsequent viewing is then a lot faster. The thumbnails can be either Small, Medium or Large. On a few occasions when I changed from large to small and back again the thumbnails displayed a large frame with a small thumbnail. To correct this I had to delete the "hpothb07" file from the folder and let the application recreate the thumbnails.

Small	Medium	Large	Don't know

Double clicking a thumbnail opens the image editing module. This offers fairly basic operations such as Rotate, Crop, Resize, Colour, Saturation, Brightness, Contrast, Sharpen, Red-Eye removal and Add a title. All the editing options are on the right hand side. The editing features are enough to correct images to a point and should be enough to get someone going. The text features are limited and only offer 16 font colours. What happened to the other 72, 982,157 colours?

The HP Image Editor

On the right hand side of the gallery window there are various options including; Photo Prints - select multiple prints and select the quantity. HP Album - prints the pictures using a number of pre-defined templates. Quick Prints - launches the printer interface. E-Mail - prepares pictures for either screen viewing or printing and places them as an attachment to Microsoft Outlook. I couldn't get this to work with AOL. HP Instant Share - this sends an e-mail displaying thumbnails of your files. The recipient clicks on a link in the e-mail to view the full size picture. This feature worked very well and I successfully uploaded the pictures, the only thing you might have to do is to re-configure your Firewall software whilst sending. The pictures are stored on HP's server for about one month.

E-Mail received	View, forward or print the pictures

The next application is HP's Memories Disc Creator, this creates a self running slide show and writes it to CD, this can be played on any DVD player that supports Video CD on CD-R or CD-RW media. The full resolution images will also be saved to the disc.

HP Memories Disc Creator

Finally there is a Programs button, select an image and then click on the programs button and you can send the image to that application.

HP have provided a good selection of applications which work reasonably well. I would have liked more Desk Top Publishing style features for the Album Printing application. Incidentally the Album Printing module also has an image editing feature which I thought was as good if not better than the main editing features. I can't see many more experienced users staying loyal to these applications but they are there if you need them.

The only serious gripe I have is the Photosmart 7960 User Guide, this can be found under the Help file in the HP Photo & Imaging Gallery or in the Help file located in the HP Director (quick launch bar). I would have expected this file to be accessed through the printer dialog palette or at least have a separate icon under the Hewlett-Packard programs folder, users not intending to use the bundled applications may never find this User guide.

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