HP's Photosmart 7150 is a no-frills photo printer, or at least a no-frills-worth-mentioning photo printer.
Installation of the 7150 follows the very standard HP formula; follow the handy prompts on the provided poster and you can't go too far wrong. HP's moved over to a system of numbers for its ink cartridges, which is hell if you're moving from an older printer and need to read the tiny, tiny small print to work out which cartridge you need. In the case of the 7150, though, the numbers game starts to make sense; the ink trays are numbered, so it's not possible to buy the wrong units or put them in the wrong place. The use of a single colour, black or photo cartridge also means it's possible to use the 7150 as either a dedicated photo printer or simpler inkjet printer.
The 7150 has support for a wide variety of paper types, from A4 down to 4R pages. Its first frill is that 4R Photo paper can be loaded in via a small sub-tray that's attached to the out tray. While that's a nice and potentially useful feature, we had problems with it in actual use. Paper is loaded in in the normal fashion, but to then 'force' it against the pickup rollers an adjustable arm has to be flicked forward; on a couple of printing attempts the photo paper stuck in the rollers, although we were never too sure if we had too much pressure, or not enough. To make matters worse, printer jams only resolved for us with a complete system reboot; just powering down the printer was not enough. We did discover that it's perfectly possible to just feed in smaller paper in the normal manner, and not encounter this problem.
As with the rest of HP's current printer range, everything runs through the HP Director application; this is used in other products to control scanning and faxing, but all the 7150 manages is printing, so in this incarnation of Director, that's all you'll see.
The Photosmart 7150 supports USB 2.0 connectivity, although unless you're working with truly huge images, the speed bottleneck is virtually never at the PC end. It will always take you longer to print a photo-quality image than it will to send it to the printer. All of our testing was done with USB 1.1 connectivity, as that's what most of the market will still have at this point in time.
A single 4R photo took two and a half minutes to print at best quality, borderless mode. A full sized page of four shots took four and a half minutes. Add another minute to that for a full size A4 image, and you've got an acceptable, but not stand-out printing package. HP rates the 7150 as capable of up to 14ppm in draft black mode; as always that's a top-end figure that you're unlikely to see in all but the leanest printing simulations.
Reproduction quality with the Photo cartridge was excellent, and the inbuilt tools in Director allow for most common photo sizes to be created quite easily. Like a lot of the Photosmart range, HP boasts of automatic paper detection, bypassing the need for you to manually select paper type. Automatic detection, however, only goes so far; we still got better results, especially when using high quality paper, by forcing our paper choices rather than relying on the 7150's automatic detection routine.
HP also promotes the 7150 on its ability to link seamlessly to digital cameras that provide a USB out port of the correct type, which coincidentally happens to be most of HP's current camera range. This is a reasonable feature; you could select the photos on your camera LCD and then print them without the need for a PC. We suspect, however, that most users will want to peruse and probably touch up their photos in any case, so it's rather moot. We also preferred the approach of the HP PSC 950, which has integrated digital media ports, meaning you can do away with the need to hook up the camera at all.
At AU$349, the HP Photosmart 7150 is reasonably priced. Its major frills failed to thrill us, but the rest of the package performed acceptably in our tests.
HP Photosmart 7150
Company: HP Australia
Price: AU$349
Distributor: Selected resellers
Phone: 13 13 47
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