HP Photosmart 7960 printer

Page 6.

Printer parts.

Day 3.

I will return to printing later in the review, in the mean time lets take a closer look at the printer itself. The printer is a solid and well constructed unit, perhaps just a tad wider than the average A4 printer (54cm). As per most other printers the materials used are plastic with a brushed steel finish. The control panel buttons have a positive feel to them and are big enough for most peoples hands.

The paper feed on this and other HP printers is the usual U turn, i.e. you place the media face down in the bottom tray and it gets fed out onto the upper tray. To load paper you have to lift the paper catch which locks into the up position. Next adjust the Paper length guide, load the A4 paper and push the guide back to the edge of the paper. The paper width guide should be adjusted to fit close to the edge of the paper, but not too tightly. As the media coating is facing downwards, extra care must be taken when loading the paper to avoid scratching the paper's surface on the guides. I would recommend placing a sheet of plain paper on the bottom of your paper to avoid accidental damage to the surface. A smaller Photo paper tray is located on the top level, up to 20 sheets of 10 x 15cm sheets can be pre-loaded. Once loaded the paper tray has to be pushed into the ready position using the lever on the right hand side.

The paper catch tray	Paper catch extension
The paper width guide	The paper length guide out
Photo tray loaded	Photo tray positioned ready for use

I have never been keen on front loading printers, I prefer a straight paper path. Although I do have my own fair share of problems with straight path back feed printers, in that two sheets or more can drop down at once. Since writing this, the printer has on two occasions fed more than one sheet through, this was using Kodak plain paper. The other point to watch out for with U turn feed is that you are limited to a maximum paper weight. HP's new Premium Plus Photo Paper at 280 g/m is a good photographic weight which will please most.

You can have both printers trays loaded with media at the same time. This is convenient if you want to print multiple sizes, it saves you having to reload the printer each time. One weakness on the printer is the Paper catch extension, this is very flimsy, although it does as it says, without it the paper is literally thrown out of the printer. I can imagine that this would be easy to knock off if the printer was placed too close to the edge of a table. The printer is quite in operation but not as quite as the Canon i950 and there is a fair amount of vibration from the printer whilst in action.

Lots of buttons to press and an excellent LCD screen built in

On the front panel there are 14 buttons, most of these are for Direct Print Printing and image editing, I will devote a whole section to this later. The bottom left button releases the front cover, for access to the inks etc.

Easy access to the inks

The top cover also opens to give access to the memory card reader and ink storage compartment. The card reader supports the following memory card types; CompactFlash Type I and II; Microdrive; Multi-Media Card; Secure Digital SmartMedia; Memory Stick (Pro, Duo and Magic Gate); xD-Picture Card and a Direct printing port for a digital camera. Besides being able to print directly from the memory card you can also transfer the pictures to a computer, just press the Save button. This launches a Welcome to Unload Images screen, from here you can click on the Start Unload button or you can define your own settings to where you want to save the images. Click on each panel below for an enlarged view.

Choose which images to unload	Define where you want to save the images to

You can select a folder where you want images to be stored, but you can't create your own custom folder. However, the downloaded images can be placed in a auto-named subfolder, this will be given a date which is extracted from the image EXIF data. Downloading 25 images took 27 seconds, using a dedicated USB card reader the same files took 18 seconds to transfer. The memory card reader is certainly a feature worth having and it has been well thought out. On completion of download the hp Photo & Imaging gallery is launched with your images displayed.

Images are displayed on completion of download

The HP Photo & Imaging Gallery has many easy to use features including; a simple image editor, rotate, Photo prints, Album printing, Quick printing, e-mail, HP instant share, Memories disc and a image application launcher (set your chosen application). The gallery is very fast at displaying folder content, thumbnail sizes can be small, medium or large.

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