HP launched their new wide carriage printer, Photosmart B8550 at Photokina, one of the world’s largest photography tradeshows. The objective was simple – HP has flagged their campaign in the A3 inkjet market and are directly competing with Epson, the leader in this segment.

This HP inkjet printer is an A3 inkjet printer and a photo printer that is capable of outputting 15 x 10cm photo prints. Similar to A4 photo printers, this printer has a LCD screen to view images before printing, three memory slots and a PictBridge port for direct camera connection. The lack of networking functionality on this printer baffles us as the reasoning behind leaving out the most desired feature of the times cannot be a smart one.

TR has conducted a thorough testing on Photosmart B8550 and the results are more or less on the expected lines.

Printing quality on a HP is always presumably good and this one is no different. Black text prints are sharp with clean cuts and smooth characters. Colour printing is neat as well, except for the yellow shade that looked muddy. Photo printing is excellent but some minute details were left out, which is not a big concern.

One of the biggest concerns about this printer is the amount of time it takes for performing its regular household duties. The printer head loiters around and produces grinding sounds anywhere between 30 and 90 seconds before it loads the first sheet. This is unacceptable for an inkjet printer, especially for those who bear the print heads on the cartridge.

HP claims that the printer spits out monochrome prints at 33ppm and colour prints at 31ppm. But, it was seen that the claimed rates were a 1000% exaggeration of the reality; printing speed was in the range of 3ppm which is still not bad for an A3 printer.

HP has gone the Canon way with five separate ink cartridges, probably for the very first time. This has paid out with the cost per print for colour at 7.36p but black prints are still not on the economical side at 2.95p.

B8550 is a decent wide carriage printer. The time to spit out the first print is quite annoying and maybe the first of the kind. All we could say is “well done HP” for trying to compete with the leader, and we feel that HP has a long way to go in this segment.