HP Photosmart Plus B209a – Wireless All-in-One Printer Review

advantages

• Two paper trays (standard, photo)
• Excellent print quality
• good value

key specifications

• Evaluation Price: £89.99
• 1200 dpi print resolution
• SD/MemoryStick/xD card slot
• 1200 ppi scanner
• 61mm touchscreen display
• PictBridge

(Center)

There are three Photosmart all-in-ones in the HP range: the Photosmart, the Photosmart Wireless, and the Photosmart Plus, which sits in the middle and is the subject of this review. It’s designed as a home machine, with a propensity for photo printing.

Like its stablemates, the Plus is finished in textured and high-gloss black, and features a raised panel that protrudes in front of the flatbed scanner lid, which houses a 61mm touchscreen with dedicated touch buttons on either side. Its position makes the screen very easy to use, as does the sensitivity of the panel itself.

Below the control panel are two memory card slots that accept SD, MemoryStick, and xD cards. There’s also a PictBridge socket that can also read USB drives.

Two paper trays are built into the front of the device, one 150-sheet tray for plain paper up to A4 size and another for up to 20 sheets of photo paper. The photo tray is automatically connected to the printer when you select this media for printing. Pages eject to the top of the paper trays, although you have to extend a support and paper stop, which greatly increases the overall footprint of the Photosmart Plus.

This is a four color printer that accepts either standard or XL cartridges in the CMYK inks. The cartridges, which look oddly similar to Canon supplies, are inserted into the printhead and the machine then produces an alignment page, which needs to be rescanned before the first prints can be made.

Drivers are provided for Windows and OS X, and Linux alternatives using the CUPS protocol can be downloaded from the HP website. There’s also the usual mix of HP utilities, including Solution Center, and a copy of Windows Live Photo Gallery.

The printer can be connected via USB or Ethernet, but it also offers wireless connectivity, although you’ll need to temporarily connect via USB (a cable is included) to make the connection. This can be inconvenient if you bought the machine because you have space constraints on your desk.

The biggest catch with how the Photosmart Plus B209a works is the same as the Photosmart Wireless. It can take a long time for a print job to start as the printer checks itself and primes its engine. During our testing, it took 79 seconds to start printing a five-page text document.

The ISO speed standard states that times can be measured from the start of paper movement from the input tray, which excludes preparation time. This is very handy as it gives a best-case result. We have no idea why the printer has to fiddle around for so long.

Aside from the infrequent print start delays that happen maybe once every five prints or so, print speeds are pretty good for this class of device. Our 5-page text print showed a speed of 7.69 pages per minute and the 20-page test increased this to 9.92 pages per minute. The 5-sided text and graphics print produced a speed of 5.08 ppm.

10 x 10cm photo print speeds are slower than some of the device’s competitors, particularly all-in-ones from Canon and Epson. The HP device takes about a minute regardless of the source, while recent tests of the PIXMA MP990 and Stylus Photo PX710W achieve print speeds of around 30 seconds. Nevertheless, a pressure is not correct.

The print quality is consistently quite good. Black text shows very little evidence of ink bleeding, and even at small point sizes, characters are well formed with only slight jaggies. Business graphics are bright and generally smooth with no evidence of dither patterns and only slight fuzzing of black text over colored backgrounds. A color copy was also reproduced well, although the colors are a bit light.

Photo prints are good too, although like many devices we’ve reviewed, some detail is lost in darker areas of the image. However, the colors are natural and the gradations are fluid. If required, the device can produce vivid tones on HP’s own Advanced Photo paper.

The four cartridges are the only consumables in this machine and using the higher yield XL versions results in a page cost of 3.07p for an ISO black page and 7.71p for ISO colour. While the black page cost is very similar to the other two machines we’ve mentioned, the colored page cost is between 1.5p and 2.0p cheaper – a worthwhile saving.

verdict

For just under £90, including the revised VAT rate of 17.5 per cent, this is a very capable all-in-one. We like the dual paper trays and the machine’s convenience in powering the photo tray. We also like the cost per side and positive touchscreen response. We’re not too keen on how long it sometimes takes for a document to start printing, but the print quality is excellent, so overall it’s a good choice for anyone on a budget.

points in detail

• print speed 7

• functions 9

• value 9

• print quality 9

characteristics

To press

to scan