Hewlett Packard Photosmart D7560 InkJet Printer

I've owned a succession of photo-quality printers and purchased the HP Photosmart D7560 to replace a Photosmart 7950 that was still going strong after four years. The price was right and the new D7560 offered optical disc label printing. The two printers have some significant differences.

Since HP favors a front loading tray, there needs to be a way to position a snapshot-size sheet of paper far enough forward that it can be pulled in by the feed rollers. The 7950 required you to remove letter-size paper from its single tray, replace it with 6" X 4" or 5" X 7" photo paper and manually push in a flimsy lever to move the photo tray into place. With the D7560, smaller size photographic paper can be placed in a dedicated upper tray which has its own loading motor (letter size paper can remain in the lower tray). The hinged dust cover is a nice touch.

For many years, HP has used a cartridge in its Photosmarts that contained an ink tank and a print head. When you replaced the cartridge the head was replaced also and the printers really didn't clog. The D7560 uses seperate ink tanks for the three primary colors plus black and photo black. This system makes new ink purchases less costly for the consumer. (I've had problems with head clogs in other printers with this design, including the HP Officejets.) I haven't had any clogs in the past four months of using the printer, but I recommend always powering it off via the control panel, not an AC strip, to be sure the tanks are capped properly.

The printer runs through frequent cleaning cycles. These slow down overall printing speed, due to "please wait, printer preparation in progress" messages, and add noise. The ink monitoring system can constantly bombard the user with warning messages. When a tank runs low, the printer flashes a yellow LED prior to printing, puts a "low ink" message on its LCD screen, launches and displays a message via the HP Printer Utility (this can be disabled), and adds a note to the OS X print dialog box. (I kept waiting for it to start singing "How Dry I Am.") These reminders don't stop the print process, but they continue until you replace the offending tank. Once the warning occurs, I generally get through about 4 or 5 full size photo prints or 15 to 20 business pages (letters, maps, etc.) before the ink actually runs out.

CD and DVD labels require special "printable" discs which are readily available and inexpensive (much cheaper than the gold HP Light Scribe discs). The unprinted disc is placed into a special carrier which stores inside the printer when not in use. I only use the included label design software to print the discs, which is an easy process. I use my expensive design skills from college days and create the label design in Photoshop and import it. (The HP Photosmart Create software reads Photoshop CS 3 documents without problems.) The finished label has a semi-matte surface, with brilliant color and very sharp text. The ink doesn't completely cover the disc surface, leaving a bit of white space along the edges and center. Overall, printed discs look much better than paper-labelled ones and won't cause problems in slot-loading CD drives.

Normal documents print quickly, with dark, sharp text that's indistinguishable from a high quality laser printer when using HP inkjet paper. (I haven't tested plain paper in this printer.) Photo quality is high, with good color fidelity. My monitor was calibrated using the OS X built-in utility and output matched with the printer without any additional tweaking. Grayscale prints do not show any color casts; the photo black ink probably helps with this.

The D7560 has card slots for all popular sizes of camera cards. Printing can be done directly via the built-in LCD screen, but I have not tried this feature. When not in use, the LCD displays a demo of the printer's features, which will come in handy if you want to sell this printer in a future yard sale.