A Standalone, at a Price: hp photosmart 7350

Introduction

The hp photosmart 7350 is a standalone printer. This means it has four readers supporting the most widespread memory cards: Compact Flash, SD, MMC, Memory Stick and SmartMedia. In fact, all it lacks is the very recent xD. With a name like photosmart, and with card readers and a photo cartridge as part of the package, both amateur and semi-professional photographers should be lining up to buy it. But other photosmarts could be more up their alley.

Two factors we think will cool the ardor of potential users:

• Having to use the photo cartridge to print photos, remove it to print text and put it back again for the next image soon gets pretty tedious. In this respect, the photosmart 7550 is much better, because it uses three cartridges at the same time.
• Even more important is that photos printed in standalone mode are not as good as those printed via a computer. In the end, you are likely to give up on them, and if so, you would be better off with a photosmart 7150, which is less expensive to buy.

The Tests

We ran the same tests as usual: text, compound, monochrome and color documents, ordinary, draft and high definition resolution, etc. You can read a detailed description here .