High-End Gear: HP Photosmart 7960 and Scanjet 4600

What Standalone Retouching Lacks

What we think the menus lack

It's a shame, because it means you probably won't actually use the menus very much as they are. We would have preferred more advanced functions.

• For instance, a red-eye removal function which, when it fails in automatic mode, can zoom in on the image to select the zone to correct with the cursor.
• Or a histogram feature so you can at least retouch the grays, and ideally the color levels as well.
• It also a needs saturation corrector.
• And then the icing on the cake, if it had white balance correction... We all know how digital cameras stumble here. We would really appreciate being able to correct photos that are too red, too green or whatever.

Text Print Quality

With the black cartridge, the photosmart 7960 prints superbly in color and black and white. In regular resolution, they are somewhat better than their rivals (Inkjet-Printer: Heavyweights From Canon, Epson and HP ).

If you set it in Draft mode in the driver, the printer gains in speed (three times faster), mainly due to a quicker feed. But it is noisier and less stable, moving quite a lot. However, the quality is so good that, even at the lowest resolution, many will use this as the default mode and only use higher resolution for important documents.