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Photosmart 7960: Printing With Beauty and Brains Words by Ric Getter November 2004 When it comes to some things, I tend to be pretty traditional. Printers print. Computers compute. And, a camera isn't a camera unless has a manual mode. So why load a printer down with all kinds of extra smarts for printing straight from a memory card? I mean, doesn't everybody love to spend a half hour tweaking an image in Photoshop®?

Okay. Maybe not everybody. And then again, maybe not everybody can afford to have a high-end photo-quality printer for the dedicated hobbyist and an easy-to-use picture-maker for the rest of the family. HP's flagship home and small office printer should keep all of you happy: the Photosmart 7960.

The physical design of the 4960 is pretty impressive even though it has a rather hefty footprint for a letter-size printer. All the printer's primary features are available through dedicated buttons on the front panel with more advanced functions accessible via the 2.5" LCD display and cursor controls. All the card memory slots, a second USB port (for drive-by printing from a laptop or PictBridge-enabled camera) and a storage area for the fourth (exchangeable) cartridge are safe from dust under the flip-up top cover. Like most of HP's inkjets, paper loading and output are on the front end. There's an upper tray dedicated to 4 x 6 photo printing and a lower tray for everything else from index cards to letter-width banner paper. The way the case is designed, access to the paper path is somewhat constrained from the front, but there is an access panel (that can be replaced with a duplex printing unit) in the rear of the printer for dealing with a paper jam.

Paper Sense
The 7960 has the welcome ability to automatically sense the kind of paper that is feeding through the tray and, in most cases, will adjust the necessary settings accordingly. I had good results with everything from standard 20 lb bond to HP's top-of-the-line glossy photo stock. The upper photo tray handles direct, memory card printing with ease. However, I discovered that I needed to be quite specific with the size and centering settings when printing from the computer. The printer's driver set adds quite a variety of options to the Print dialog, virtually all of them accessible through the Paper/Quality drop-down menu and fitting smoothly into the Aqua interface. I found myself making abundant use of OS X's ability to save a variety of settings configurations.

You'll also find a wide variety of print quality settings available on the Photosmart: everything from an ink-stingy Fast Draft mode to a knock-your-socks-off "Maximum dpi" setting. As with all inkjets, the better the quality, the longer your wait. But with this printer, your patience will definitely be rewarded. For text, the draft modes (offering up to 21 pages per minute) will be just fine for most documents that are intended for your own use. On the other hand, it took a 30x magnifier to see the difference between the Photosmart's "Normal" mode and my 600dpi laser printer. The printing is quiet, but there was definitely noticeable processing delay before even small jobs began printing. Even though I had downloaded the latest driver set from HP (all 82MB of it), this seems like an area that could still use some improvement.

Shades of Gray
One of the Photosmart's most unique features is the exchangeable third cartridge. The standard black cartridge is fine for your normal printing chores. For photo quality printing, you'll swap this out for the gray/black cartridge. (The printer comes with an airtight cap for the cartridge you've removed.) The combination of six colored inks, a newly formulated black, and two shades of gray produce eye-popping results for a reasonably priced consumer printer.

Black and white photography is where the Photosmart really shines. Shooting with my Coolpix 990 in monochrome mode and fine-tuning the image in Photoshop, the 7960 produces black and white prints as good as the very best I ever turned out in a darkroom. The detail and tonality were comparable to 8x10's from 120-size film.

For people who want the easiest possible way to go from their camera to paper, the printer goes to some amazing lengths to help out. In terms of whiz-bang, high tech, the coolest feature is HP's "smart" proof sheet. It works a little like those Scantron tests you took in school. You fill in little bubbles under the print you want and a couple of others to select size and quantity for the batch of prints. Then, feed the sheet back into the printer. It will read your order and start printing. The printer can also send a compressed version of a selected photo via e-mail or save it to your hard drive via front panel buttons.

The Bottom Line
HP's Photosmart 7960 is a pretty slick device for a machine that's meant to please such a wide audience. For a printer without a professional price tag, the quality of the output as well as overall design and performance are impressive. In terms of hard numbers, the 7960's maximum dpi (4800) is slightly lower than its primary competitor. However, I found that its ink technology, gives the prints more visual punch. For a family's printer, it's a valid compromise for just about everything except quality.

HP Photosmart 7960, $229 SRP, www.hp.com