Looking to purchase a photo printer

[Fred Haider]

I looking to purchase a new printer. Been leaning toward a HP 9180 but I have vista home premium and it does not appear that the printer is Vista certified. Should this be a big concern? Are other printers with the same price point better? Suggestions and comments are greatly appreciated!

[des_enzano]

I have a new HPC4280 and a nine year old Epson 660 The HP is faster and handy for printing out letters, documents etc. but the quality of photo prints is poor. The Epson is slow but prints great images. Needless to say I wish I had bought a new Epson instead of an HP.

George

[ricklepage]

The B9180 is a good printer that prints excellent photos, although, unless you need Ethernet networking and support for really thick paper, you might want to look at its cheaper sibling, the Photosmart Pro B8850, which uses the same inks as the B9180.

Good things about those two printers:
- great prints, especially on matte and fine art papers;
- good prints on glossy papers;
- really easy to add alternative paper types to the print driver;
- large ink cartridges, which means fewer changes (although the ink is priced pretty much the same per ml as Canon and Epson);
- great black-and-white prints.

Not-so-good:
- HP doesn't have a great selection of glossy paper, which is part of the reason the glossy prints are only good (They look kind of flat and dull sometimes)
- The manual feed tray is ok, but a lot of people tend to complain about paper not lining up correctly, which means the printer prints a bit crooked.

I run a photo printer site called Printerville, and you can check out a review of the B8850, as well as Epson's competing printer, the Stylus Photo R1900, which is a great printer in its own right.

http://www.printerville.net/

Hope this helps,
Rick

[Fred Haider]

Thanks for taking the time to provide input. I'll certainly check out the website.

[WayneS]

I don't print any of my own pictures anymore, but happened across some advertising by Kodak, about reducing ink costs by 50%. Might be worth looking into!

Wayne

http://printers.kodak.com/