Is the HP Photosmart D7260 any good?

The Photosmart D7260 is  clearly  feature packed. Its huge range of features includes a 3½in touch screen and memory card slots, so it’s easy to print photos without a  computer  . It’s one of only two A4 printers here that can be connected to your network, with 10/100 Ethernet port as well as USB Hi-Speed and PictBridge USB ports. It’s  very well  configured, with a separate paper tray above the main tray for 6×4in or 5×7in photo paper. A4 in the main tray is held in place by plastic guides that have to be aligned cautiously to prevent prints from  becoming skewed  .

The D7260 uses six ink cartridges to create delicately shaded photographic colours. Gradations between colours were generally smooth and colours  seemed  accurate in isolation, although light skin tones appeared yellowish in our side-by-side comparisons. Dark colours were not rendered as precisely as we’d have liked and many had a faintly blue hue. Photo quality was  generally very   good, and the slightly oversaturated visual aspect of some images sometimes worked to good effect. Ink cartridges for the HP photosmart D7260 are numbered as the 363 range, with light cyan & light magenta added to the normal black, cyan, magenta & yellow.

Colour document prints looked brilliant, with clear, solid  print quality  on almost all our graphs and diagrams, although areas of solid black were printed as grey . Normal-quality prints were slightly slow, but we were impressed with draft print speeds of 9.7ppm and draft text that looked good enough for most everyday printing tasks. Photo prints were rather slow,  especially  our 10×8in prints, which took over 10 minutes to come forth. Print costs using genuine HP ink cartridges were among the highest here , with a total mixed-colour page cost of 7.5p. The D7260 has a 6×4in photo cost of 33.3p, which is quite expensive  .

HP’s Photosmart D7260 produced  very attractive  photos and good-looking documents, but neither were  that much  better than those of Canon’s Pixma iP4500, which is  much  cheaper to buy and run. Unless you need the D7260’s direct- and network-printing capabilities, the iP4500 is a better all-rounder and Epson’s Stylus Photo R360 prints higher-quality  photographs  .