First Prints

There is something very exciting about watching a print appear in front of your eyes, the anticipation of what it is going to look like can be almost unbearable. I used to get this excitement in the darkroom whilst waiting for the first signs of the print in the developer. Seeing the print materialise under a red light is magical. Many people feel this has been lost with inkjet printing, believe me it hasn't. The HP feeds you your print bit by bit and after four minutes 35 seconds you are presented with the final product an A4 print.

So what are the first prints like?

I have used the usual photo-i test chart and set the printer to print using the default HP settings. The Colour Management setting on the Colour tab - sorry Color tab was set to ColorSmart/sRGB, this produced an A4 print with neutral colours and excellent saturation. If there is a criticism then I would say the print errs towards the cool side, but you will be proud of the printers first effort. I made a couple of minor tweaks in the Advanced Colour Settings (Colour tone +5 and reduced the Cyan by -5) and this produced a print that can only be described as outstanding. The HP Premium Plus Glossy print took 4min 35 sec. The second print produced a pleasing warm skin colour on Sophie (her mum loves the print). As usual clicking on the first original file will open the full resolution original file, use this to test your own printer etc.

Original file	First print - out of the box settings	Second print - tweaked settings

Looking more critically at the second print, the reds and magenta are much deeper than the original file, look at the swatches below. This was also the case with the HP 7960, when the grey No.59 cartridge was fitted the prints produced deeper colours. The grey cartridge is now called the No 100. I made a third print and reduced the black in each colour (RGB & CMY) by 10% and this produced colours that are about as good as it gets - short of messing about with custom profiles.

Original file	Swatches from print number 2
Third swatches with 10% reduction in black	The rest of the image is still looking good too

There was no doubt that the grey cartridge added extra depth to prints produced on the 7960, this is also the case here. I will do some more printing later, and compare the prints with and without the No 100 grey cartridge.

HP 8450 scanned at 600dpi	HP 7960 scanned at 600dpi
Canon ip8500	Epson R800

The HP has produced some of the smoothest tones I have seen on any inkjet printer. I am also glad to see that they have turned off the sharpening which was beginning to annoy me on the 7960. Sharpness wise, the Canon ip8500 produced the best print, I should stress that this is a huge magnification - imagine seeing a child with eyes this big in real life.

Strong vibrant colours across the entire range
Detail is held in the black and white thread	Reds are almost electric
Great yellow and green	Blue is excellent, darker blue has too much magenta

The colours on the reels are amongst the best I have seen from any printer that I have reviewed. Bearing in mind that the above scans are made from the third print produced by this printer. I produced over 55 prints on the Canon ip8500 before I finally got the result I wanted. These colours are going to appeal to many people who just want to produce pictures without the fuss. For the more demanding photographer the 8450 has sufficient controls to tailor the output to their own preferences.