This is a thermal inkjet printer by HP which is great for photo printing and has an LCD on it, but is too expensive.

Sum and Substance:

Thumbs Up:

LCD for surfing, wireless connectivity, separate trays for photo paper and standard printing paper, attractive looks.

Thumbs Down:

LCD is a bit slow to respond, doesn’t have autodocument feeder, applications tend to freeze.

Inside the Trunk:

Software disc.

The Whiz Kid Speaks:

Width 18.28 inch, Depth 19.64 inch, Height 7.88 inch, Weight 16.5 lbs
Enclosure Color Black, Inkjet Technology – HP Thermal Inkjet, Ink Palette (Colors) 5-ink, LCD Touch screen interface, Wireless connectivity, PictBridge connectivity.

Installed memory
256 MB, Maximum memory supported – 256 MB, No manual feed slot, Output Tray Capacity 50, Maximum paper size (width) – 8.5 inches, Duplex printing supported, Black-and-white print speed – 33 ppm, Color print speed – 32 ppm, USB 2.0 connectivity,

Media slots xD-Picture Card, SD Card, CompactFlash, Memory Stick
Included network card    Wireless Ethernet – 300 Mbps IEEE802.11 Draft N, Bluetooth

Resolutions
Black-and-white horizontal resolution    600 dpi
Black-and-white vertical resolution    600 cpi
Color vertical resolution    9600 dpi
Color horizontal resolution    2400 dpi

Scanning
Optical scan resolution    600 by 600
Scan Area (inches)    8.5 by 11.7
Scanner Type    Flatbed
Scanning Image Sensor Type    CIS
Maximum scan resolution    2400 x 2400

Faxing
Fax Resolution (dpi)    300 by 300 dpi

Razzle Dazzle:

HP’s latest printer product is nothing like previous ones. They have worked hard to make a good looking printer and it pays rich dividends. There are rounded edges all round the printer which would make it easy to carry around.

The smooth lines, lattice design, matte-black and silver finish on the top cover all compliments the bright 4.33-inch touch-screen control panel. The MFD is 18 inches wide, 19.3 inches long and 7.7 inches deep which easily fits any work space. The rear sticks out a bit which looks a little ugly.

The front of the printer is bare and all you get is the 4.33 inch touch screen. There is a power button which sits on the right side and there are two LEDs which indicate wireless and Bluetooth connection status.

A plastic sliding cover protects the media card reader and Pictbridge USB port underneath the swivel display and on the back of the printer there is autoduplexer, power port, Ethernet port, a USB port, and two phone jacks for the fax machine.

For the looks, the best part has to be the sleek LCD which resembles iPhone or iPod touch.

Inside Dope:

Touch screen printers are rare and not many manufactures make it mainly because people don’t need a touch screen interface for a printer since it is not used as often as a phone or MP3 player. The other reason is that a touch screen interface increases the price of the printer and hence manufacturers are coy over making touch screen MFDs.

HP and Lexmark are the two big players in the touch screen printer market and we got a HP Photosmart Premium TouchSmart Web in our offices for review. Now as the name suggests, this is a premium printer and not for light use. The printer can be connected wirelessly to internet and you can surf the web on the tiny LCD which is on the printer and print documents through them.

The LCD on the printer looks quite similar to iPhone kept in landscape mode. But it is a little smaller than 4.5. The LCD looks very cute with an arm from the printer holding out the device. We are fans of the iPhone and had a great time using this screen but we found that it is not as responsive or quick as iPhone, but this is not an iPhone and a slow screen would do just fine. You can customize the LCD’s home screen with shortcut applications designed for productivity, fun, and utility. Some physical buttons on the printer could have been accommodated on the printer.

The printer has excellent quality for document and photo but it comes at a premium since is costly.

The rear end of the printer sticks out because of the removable autoduplexer. It lets you save money and helps out the environment by printing on both sides of a single sheet of paper. The printer doesn’t have an autodocument feeder (ADF) so you will have to manually load every single paper in to the scanner by hand. The absence of an ADF is a drawback since you can get on with other work once you feed 50 papers in the scanner. The device picks up paper one by one automatically and your presence is not needed.
We don’t know why ADF is not present in this printer, all photo printers have one.

HP has brought in the dual paper input tray just like the one on Photosmart C8180. The feeder has two trays one for up to 20 sheets of 4-inch-by-6-inch photo paper and another underneath for 100 sheets of standard 8.5-inch-by-11-inch letter-size paper. There is a small plastic arm which extends out from the tray for the outbound prints. The paper handles paper well and there weren’t any jamming of papers while using the printer. But when you fill up the photo tray it will cover the bottom of the LCD display which might annoy you. The piece of plastic that holds the cover open is too delicate for the weight and you will have to use two hands to refill paper.

There are five cartridges of ink in the HP Photosmart Premium TouchSmart Web – photo black, black, magenta, cyan and yellow and each has its slot which is dedicted under the hood.

You can adjust the display of the LCD screen up and down for your viewing convenience. We really liked the LCD screen which looked just like iPhone or iPod touch. The home screen of the printer LCD has place for your favorite applications as well as four shortcut buttons at the bottom for photo printing. Copy, scan and fax. You can scroll among these applications just like iPhone. You can add or delete applications from the screen, to add the applications you can go to the HP app studio. The LCD looks quite like iPhone but it is not as quick and responsive as the Apple’s product. It takes time to respond for which you will have to be patient. We would advice to you not to add applications which you don’t need because you will have to scroll through the applications and the lag will get on your nerves.

The LCD sometimes froze midway through our tests and the only way to get out of this is to restart the printer. We had to go again through the connection procedure of internet and then go to the application that we were using. All this consumes a lot of time.

We tried some of the applications and we were glad to find that they are all free. You don’t need to attach this printer to a computer you just need a wireless connection and you can browse on the printer’s LCD and download all that you want. HP is planning to launch a SDK to for developers so that they can make their own applications for the store. We appreciate this step taken by HP giving the developers freedom to do what they want.

We tried to setup the printer using the Wireless Setup Wizard and we found it quite intuitive. It took less than ten minutes. If you click on “Get More” button you go directly to the store where you can download applications and also rate them and leave comments for potential future users. The applications aren’t that good and take lot of time to load which is partly because of the laggy touch screen. Some of the applications will bore you with too many sub menus.

If you use this screen for too long you will wish you had full sized keyboard and mouse since the virtual keyboard isn’t the best for surfing. It seems the touch screen is put up by HP to tell people “look what we can do” but it doesn’t have any real use and you would rather use a computer for internet purposes rather than this screen.

We tried getting a Google map on a computer and then printing it out through the printer and then we tried to get the map through the printer LCD and printing it. And the former task took us less time. And we also found that there were less features on Google Maps on the LCD as compared to a computer. The LCD didn’t show driving directions, location history, or autocomplete words on Google maps.

HP Photosmart Premium TouchSmart Web is excellent when it comes to taking fast print outs. It took about eight printouts per minute which beats all other printer speeds. The printer does well when it comes to photo printing too, but it is not the fastest in photo printing. The print quality of TouchSmart Web is good too. Black text appears sharp and richly formed, color photos good but we have seen better. We found graininess in the color blocks. But we are fully satisfied with the black and photo printing of this printer. This is a good printer for photo enthusiasts who like to keep a collection of photo prints.

One more thing that is worth mentioning is HP’s efforts to make this planet greener. The printer ships in recyclable bags.

Nitty Gritty:

The printer continues the HP’s legacy of excellent quality document and photo prints at snappy speeds. This is a superb MFD, the touch screen LCD is a bit laggy and the high price might turn you off. You will get such great printing at much lesser costs if you let go of the LCD and wireless connectivity.

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