Hewlett Packard Photosmart 8150 InkJet Printer
- Black Print Speed: 20 ppm
- Color Print Speed: 20 ppm
- Output Type: Color Printer
- Technology (Detailed): Inkjet
- Printer Type: Digital Photo Printer
- Max Resolution (BW): 1200 x 1200 dpi
Available From
Why are these offers here?
Lowest Price!
- Overview
-
Reviews
- Compare Prices
User ReviewRead All Reviews »
HP Photosmart 8150 Inkjet Printer
Pros
Card Reader, 6 color capable, LCD display
Cons
slightly slow print speed
Recommended it?
Yes
The Bottom Line:
Great photo printer and with the addition of the card reader this printer is a great machine and I recommend it to everyone
A couple years ago we needed a replacement printer for our old HP Photosmart 7350 that stopped working one day. The HP 7350 served us quite well for a number of years. Out of the blue my wife received a printer in the mail as a gift; to say we were shocked was an understatement, since we really needed a new printer. The printer she received was the HP Photosmart 8150 inkjet.
It so happens that this is the very same model that I was looking at online and would have eventually bought, but now we didn't need to. We used to swear by Epson inkjet printers until we started having nothing but problems with the print head clogging with ink and also the constant cleaning cycles that would literally suck the ink cartridges dry well before we could use them for printing.
Fortunately for us HP designed their printers with the print heads built into the cartridges and if you have a clog you simply replace the cartridges and you are ready to go. The negative I would have to say would be unless you buy one of the larger format inkjet printers from HP you will be stuck with tri-color ink cartridges, unlike Canon and Epson which have gone to individual ink cartridges in most of their inkjet printers.
Features
HP packed some pretty impressive features into this printer including a card reader that reads most of the popular memory cards you will find in the digital cameras available on the market. You can even plug in a cable directly from your digital camera if it is PicBridge enabled (not really sure what cameras that includes), but you would need to consult the manufacturer of your digital camera to see if yours has it. Another pretty cool feature of this printer is it has a small color LCD screen that you can use to view the contents of your memory card so you can select which pictures you want to print. There is also a special tray that will allow you to load small sheets of photo paper.
All of the function buttons are easily accessible and labeled on the front of the printer. The LCD screen is also used to display warning messages like out of paper or low ink levels and other important messages. Along with the on screen messages on the printer, you will receive warning messages on your computer when you are printing from your computer and not directly from the card reader.
Installation
Installation was pretty easy, but it did take a bit of time to get it all setup. After hooking up the USB cable (not included) it was Windows time to detect and identify the USB device that was just attached to it and ask for the driver CD to be loaded into the computer so it can locate the correct driver. Once that was done, you still had to wait for each of the four individual card readers to be identified and a drive letter was established in the My Computer folder. This is so you remove and copy files from and to the different types of memory media that you have in your camera. Once that is all done and the test page is printed from the printer driver you are ready to use your HP Photosmart 8150 printer.
What about the print?
I think that is the most impressive part of the printer is the high quality of print that comes out of it. We have used it to print a wide range of pictures from simple black and white all the way to high resolution photo's and each image that comes out is truly amazing. It may not be the fastest inkjet printer on the market, but I don't believe there is another printer that does a better job on the quality that comes out. I have used a lot of color printers in past; including Epson Stylus, Canon and Lexmark, but this has to be one of the best non-professional grade printers I have used.
Over the past 2 years we have runs a wide range of paper types through this printer and for the most part the results have been the same; high quality prints. Now mind you, the quality of paper will definitely affect the actual final print, but we receive comparable results when printing on plain white copy paper or heavy card stock. The biggest difference we saw was when we were printing on high gloss photo paper. I couldn't tell the difference between many of the photos we printed on this printer as compared to prints that we got processed at Wal-Mart. The colors that are produced using HP's Vivera inks are quite stunning and I would put them up against Epson's and Canon any day of the week.
Print Speed and Resolution
These two specifications are used to show how fast the printer can print a page and how many dots it can squeeze in a square inch of the paper. Unfortunately, both of these numbers have so many variables that it is difficult to say how accurate the numbers are, but I will list them as HP claims.
Speed: Draft mode Black/Color 26/20 pages per minute using four ink setup
Draft mode Black/Color 20/20 pages per minute using six ink setup
note: four ink setup is black/tri-color cartridge (cyan, magenta and yellow) and six ink setup is photo tri-color and photo gray (photo cyan, magenta and yellow) and (three shade photo gray)
Resolution: Black prints at 1200dpi (dots per inch)
Color prints at 4800dpi (dots per inch)
The reason I stated that there are so many variables is because the actual resolution that your images will be printed at will depend on the settings you select and the output will also depend on the quality of the image.
It may not be as fast as some of the other models on the market, but we have never really been concerned with how fast the printer prints as long as the outcome was high quality.
My final thoughts
We were quite shocked when this HP Photosmart 8150 fell into our laps a couple of years ago and it couldn't have been better timed. We needed a new printer but we just couldn't afford to buy a new one, so now we don't need to buy one.
We have been using this printer as our main printer for a couple of years now and we couldn't be happier. We really like the built-in card reader and especially that it reads the memory card that our Olympus camera uses, that way we don't have to download the images from the card to our computer and then print them out. It also reads most of the popular memory cards that our on the market including CF. One of the additional benefits of the way the Photosmart 8150 setup a drive letter on your computer for each of the four card slots it will allow you to write files to each of those cards. This has come in handy when I needed to transfer information to my HP iPAQ PDA when the hot sync between our computer and PDA wasn't working. I just popped the CF memory card into the card reader in the printer and copied the files to the card and pulled out of the printer and popped it back into my PDA and the files were there.
List of memory cards that are readable by the built-in card reader:
CompactFlash (CF) Type I and II
Microdrives
MultimediaCard
Secure Digital
SmartMedia
Memory Sticks
xD-Picture Card
As far as the printing goes, we have been very happy with everything that we print. Since this is our main printer we have used it to print emails, kid's homework, school projects and family photos. I think the most impressive has to be how images come out on just plain white copy paper. Some printers we have had the images on plain white paper would look really washed out and lacked crisp colors, but the HP Photosmart 8150 isn't at all like that. Then when you look at the photo's that are printed on HP glossy paper you will be speechless. The colors just blew us away they were so crisp and clear.
If speed is the majority factor you use to pick your printers than you might want to stay away from this one, it doesn't quite meet the print speed as claimed, we rarely get more than 15 pages per minute and when we are printing high resolution photos we are waiting several minutes. Fortunately for us we aren't so much concerned about the amount of time it takes to print as long as we continue to get the great quality of prints.
For the most part we haven't had any problems with our printer in the couple of years we have had it. I would highly recommend this printer to anyone looking for a photo inkjet printer.
It so happens that this is the very same model that I was looking at online and would have eventually bought, but now we didn't need to. We used to swear by Epson inkjet printers until we started having nothing but problems with the print head clogging with ink and also the constant cleaning cycles that would literally suck the ink cartridges dry well before we could use them for printing.
Fortunately for us HP designed their printers with the print heads built into the cartridges and if you have a clog you simply replace the cartridges and you are ready to go. The negative I would have to say would be unless you buy one of the larger format inkjet printers from HP you will be stuck with tri-color ink cartridges, unlike Canon and Epson which have gone to individual ink cartridges in most of their inkjet printers.
Features
HP packed some pretty impressive features into this printer including a card reader that reads most of the popular memory cards you will find in the digital cameras available on the market. You can even plug in a cable directly from your digital camera if it is PicBridge enabled (not really sure what cameras that includes), but you would need to consult the manufacturer of your digital camera to see if yours has it. Another pretty cool feature of this printer is it has a small color LCD screen that you can use to view the contents of your memory card so you can select which pictures you want to print. There is also a special tray that will allow you to load small sheets of photo paper.
All of the function buttons are easily accessible and labeled on the front of the printer. The LCD screen is also used to display warning messages like out of paper or low ink levels and other important messages. Along with the on screen messages on the printer, you will receive warning messages on your computer when you are printing from your computer and not directly from the card reader.
Installation
Installation was pretty easy, but it did take a bit of time to get it all setup. After hooking up the USB cable (not included) it was Windows time to detect and identify the USB device that was just attached to it and ask for the driver CD to be loaded into the computer so it can locate the correct driver. Once that was done, you still had to wait for each of the four individual card readers to be identified and a drive letter was established in the My Computer folder. This is so you remove and copy files from and to the different types of memory media that you have in your camera. Once that is all done and the test page is printed from the printer driver you are ready to use your HP Photosmart 8150 printer.
What about the print?
I think that is the most impressive part of the printer is the high quality of print that comes out of it. We have used it to print a wide range of pictures from simple black and white all the way to high resolution photo's and each image that comes out is truly amazing. It may not be the fastest inkjet printer on the market, but I don't believe there is another printer that does a better job on the quality that comes out. I have used a lot of color printers in past; including Epson Stylus, Canon and Lexmark, but this has to be one of the best non-professional grade printers I have used.
Over the past 2 years we have runs a wide range of paper types through this printer and for the most part the results have been the same; high quality prints. Now mind you, the quality of paper will definitely affect the actual final print, but we receive comparable results when printing on plain white copy paper or heavy card stock. The biggest difference we saw was when we were printing on high gloss photo paper. I couldn't tell the difference between many of the photos we printed on this printer as compared to prints that we got processed at Wal-Mart. The colors that are produced using HP's Vivera inks are quite stunning and I would put them up against Epson's and Canon any day of the week.
Print Speed and Resolution
These two specifications are used to show how fast the printer can print a page and how many dots it can squeeze in a square inch of the paper. Unfortunately, both of these numbers have so many variables that it is difficult to say how accurate the numbers are, but I will list them as HP claims.
Speed: Draft mode Black/Color 26/20 pages per minute using four ink setup
Draft mode Black/Color 20/20 pages per minute using six ink setup
note: four ink setup is black/tri-color cartridge (cyan, magenta and yellow) and six ink setup is photo tri-color and photo gray (photo cyan, magenta and yellow) and (three shade photo gray)
Resolution: Black prints at 1200dpi (dots per inch)
Color prints at 4800dpi (dots per inch)
The reason I stated that there are so many variables is because the actual resolution that your images will be printed at will depend on the settings you select and the output will also depend on the quality of the image.
It may not be as fast as some of the other models on the market, but we have never really been concerned with how fast the printer prints as long as the outcome was high quality.
My final thoughts
We were quite shocked when this HP Photosmart 8150 fell into our laps a couple of years ago and it couldn't have been better timed. We needed a new printer but we just couldn't afford to buy a new one, so now we don't need to buy one.
We have been using this printer as our main printer for a couple of years now and we couldn't be happier. We really like the built-in card reader and especially that it reads the memory card that our Olympus camera uses, that way we don't have to download the images from the card to our computer and then print them out. It also reads most of the popular memory cards that our on the market including CF. One of the additional benefits of the way the Photosmart 8150 setup a drive letter on your computer for each of the four card slots it will allow you to write files to each of those cards. This has come in handy when I needed to transfer information to my HP iPAQ PDA when the hot sync between our computer and PDA wasn't working. I just popped the CF memory card into the card reader in the printer and copied the files to the card and pulled out of the printer and popped it back into my PDA and the files were there.
List of memory cards that are readable by the built-in card reader:
CompactFlash (CF) Type I and II
Microdrives
MultimediaCard
Secure Digital
SmartMedia
Memory Sticks
xD-Picture Card
As far as the printing goes, we have been very happy with everything that we print. Since this is our main printer we have used it to print emails, kid's homework, school projects and family photos. I think the most impressive has to be how images come out on just plain white copy paper. Some printers we have had the images on plain white paper would look really washed out and lacked crisp colors, but the HP Photosmart 8150 isn't at all like that. Then when you look at the photo's that are printed on HP glossy paper you will be speechless. The colors just blew us away they were so crisp and clear.
If speed is the majority factor you use to pick your printers than you might want to stay away from this one, it doesn't quite meet the print speed as claimed, we rarely get more than 15 pages per minute and when we are printing high resolution photos we are waiting several minutes. Fortunately for us we aren't so much concerned about the amount of time it takes to print as long as we continue to get the great quality of prints.
For the most part we haven't had any problems with our printer in the couple of years we have had it. I would highly recommend this printer to anyone looking for a photo inkjet printer.
