Product Reviews

The Photosmart 7960 is HP's flagship photo inkjet and comes with the new Photoret Pro engine. It's a development of Photoret IV, and a fourth cartridge containing three grey inks has been added too. The 7960 can print 4,097 shades of grey - ideal for black-and-white photographs. The traditional graininess associated with mono prints is all but gone and, since no colour ink is used, you'll never see a colour cast.

As we'd expected, photo quality output on glossy media is exceptional. Our test A4 photo montage had perfectly natural skin tones and the mono photo was still reassuringly neutral. Colour and greyscale fades were the smoothest we've seen and only the tiniest amount of grain was visible when looking close up. Importantly,

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at normal distances, details looked sharper and colours were more vibrant than most conventional photos. Although the 7960 isn't intended for printing text, characters are black and have only slight feathering.

Speed is the 7960's problem, though: it took well over 12 minutes to print 25 pages of text in Normal mode, although FastDraft cut this to under three minutes. Photo speed is also disappointing compared to the Canon i950 (see issue 109, p73). The 7960 took five-and-a-half minutes to print the A4 montage - four minutes longer than the i950.

However, the new HP can do borderless A4 prints and its direct printing features help make up for the tardiness. Four card slots support all media cards, even xD, and there's a 2.5in LCD for editing images before printing. Another neat trick is the proof sheet that prints thumbnails on plain paper. You tick the images and print options and the printer then scans the sheet and prints your selection. The menu system isn't as intuitive as we'd like, but the quality of the edited image is almost as good as printing from Photoshop.

Overall, the 7960 loses out to Canon's i950 on speed, but you can't match it for mono quality. It's also pretty good value overall, so if you're into direct printing and rarely in a hurry it's definitely worth investigating.