HP Photosmart Pro B9180
£450.00
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The HP Photosmart Pro B9180 has a built-in calibration system and features HP’s new Vivera pigment inks that boast increased longevity and waterproofing for your prints.
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The immense weight of the B9180 makes it quite difficult to arrange on your desk, made worse by the fact that the paper tray sticks out the front so you can’t get a good angle at it.
It requires you to not only install the eight ink cartridges (which look like some space-age ammo) but you will also need to put the four print heads in, too. These are supposed to last for the whole life of the printer so you’ll only need to do it once – hopefully. After you’ve done that the printer needs some time to sort itself out – the instructions say this can take over 20 minutes, but we timed it at just less than 1 hour from start to finish.
Designing a photo printer is a balancing act – if you increase the print speed, overall image quality is sure to suffer. The B9180 took 8 minutes 55 seconds to produce a borderless A3 size print. For a borderless A4, it took 3 minutes 44 seconds.
The B9180 is good for anyone planning to produce neutral results (eg weddings, portraits etc), as it consistently produced the most neutral results. Its comparatively flat results also have far more shadow detail, another reason why wedding or portrait photographers would favour the printer. The black & white results have a pleasing traditional look to them. Darkroom fans may even be reminded of traditional fibre-based paper, so if you value neutral prints with pleasing skin tones this is a good option.
The printer uses eight individual ink cartridges, in order to increase quality and maximise efficiency. This enables the user to simply replace the empty ones without wasting ink, as those that use multi-ink cartridges do.