All-in-one Printers for Photographers

HP Photosmart 7520 £170

The HP Photosmart 7520 is a new model for which we have the first review.
Setting
up this printer is simplicity itself. To make things easier, HP has
incorporated an animated tutorial on the printer’s large 10.9cm LCD
touchscreen. A set of installation inks is included for priming the
printer. The process takes about 5mins and then you are prompted to load
a sheet of plain paper for the automatic print head alignment. After
this you can install the printer and driver from the supplied CD or via
the internet.

The
A4 test print was made with HP Premium Plus Photo paper using the Best
setting, which took 2mins 32secs to complete. The HP 7520 may not be the
fastest printer in this test, but the colours are terrific. The print
displays vibrant colours throughout each element. The cotton reels
display good detail and saturation, although the brown reel lacks warmth
and the blue reel is a touch darker than the original. Looking at the
image of the baby, the skin colour is near-perfect and the colour and
contrast of the scenic photos closely match the original files. The
colour gradients have a smooth transition from white to solid colours,
although the solid colour swatches border on being oversaturated. This
is particularly the case with the green, while the blue patch is almost
midnight blue.

Switching our attention to the black & white
photo and gradients, we can see that it also displays a slight magenta
cast under artificial light, but is totally neutral under daylight
viewing. The shadow areas on this print are probably the best in our
group test, and detail has been maintained in both the shadow and
highlight areas of the image.

The 10.9cm LCD touchscreen is a joy
to use, and there are plenty of image-editing options when printing
direct from a memory card (SD) or from a USB memory stick, albeit many
of the options being very basic adjustments.

The HP Photosmart 7520 produces colours that have a good level of saturation and images that contain a lot of detail

There
are several options for scanning, such as scanning for email, to memory
card, USB stick or directly to your PC. The basic copy scanning
function did a good job scanning photos and directly printing to
photo-quality media. For times when you have to scan multiple pages or
photographs, the scanner also has an automatic document feeder. Other
features include fax and duplex printing. One interesting additional
feature is the ability to be able to connect the printer to the internet
and download additional templates and forms directly from the HP
website.

Overall, the HP Photosmart 7520 is a good all-round
printer and scanner, but it lacks a little of the finesse of the Canon
Pixma MG8250 (left) and the Epson Stylus Photo PX730WD

‘The HP Photosmart 7520 may not be the fastest printer in this test, but the colours are terrific’

Facts & figures

Score: ★
★
★
★

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