So no one was more surprised than I was when I had this printer up and running in less than 10 minutes. You have no idea how spectacular that made me feel and we can all be assured it was due to HP and not to me. This was the easiest installation of technology that I have ever done in my life.
The step by step directions were easy, both on paper and on the screen itself. And I couldn't believe how responsive the touch screen was. Touch screens in the past have left me wanting to hit something but this actually responded to my prompt every single time.
Once your memory card is in the printer you can view your pictures in a variety of ways, manually, slideshow, various groupings as well as perform all the editing. Luckily we've recently gone on vacation and so I had a host of tropical pictures on my memory card and I was able to edit them easily - cropping, removing the red eye, adding frames to pictures and actually writing captions directly into the picture by hand. Erasing your mistakes is an easy thing too. And the quality was superb. As I printed out pictures of the coke bottle Caribbean it looked exactly as I remembered it. J has been working with two different photo printers at his work recently without decent results and as such was feeling skeptical but when I showed him these pictures he said it was much better color quality than anything he'd been able to achieve recently.
One of the things I haven't been able to try yet is printing pictures that are already stored on our computer. My laptop is mainly for work and I am not able to install new software onto it and our laptop with our pictures on it is temporarily out of commission. But as soon as it's fixed I plan on creating a photobook using one of the books HP sent with the printer. I am going to make a smaller photobook for my daughter with pictures of all of her friends and use the larger photobook to chronicle our recent trip.
The coolest thing about the HP printer is how small and portable it is. It only weighs a little over 3 lbs and is about 10" wide. Perfect for mobility and small spaces, something I put to terrific use last night. I took it over to one of our shelters and offered to take pictures for folks who wanted them and was able to print them right then and there for some people, many of whom hadn't had a photo taken of themselves in years. Several folks wanted pictures to send to distant relatives and some wanted group pictures of their friends, folks who live in such transition means friendships are real but fleeting, and the fact that I could take their picture and immediately turn around and hand them a print was really cool and the red eye function was especially useful given the poor lighting and the tiredness of the folks we help.
I'd imagine this same portability would be terrific for birthday and holiday parties as well as day care and school events. When you can frame and/or write on the pics it makes for a nice personal token that folks can take away immediately.
The only drawback is that you can't save the edited pictures directly onto the printer. So if you want to preserve them you'd need a bit more equipment if you were trying to do it at a function which might not be the easiest depending on where you are.
If you are interested HP is running a special promotion offering 20% off of their Photobooks. I noticed an instant rebate on the printer as well. Just in time for Christmas!
