Review: HP Printer and Photo Book

As I mentioned last week, the Parent Bloggers Network recently sent me an HP Photosmart 626 Printer and two cloth bound photo books to review. Here are my thoughts.

Printer Setup

The printer was super easy to set up. It's designed to work directly with your memory card. Just pop it in and then edit or print your photos. If you want to print photos from your computer, you must purchase a USB cable separately.

For a printer that's designed to help you create a photo memory book, I didn't find this very practical. If you're making a photo book of your most recent vacation I can see how all of your pictures could still be on your memory card. But if you're making a photo book of your children's first year of life (as I was) and that child is now 4.5 years old, you're going to need the USB cable to get those photos off of your computer.

I can see how working directly from the memory card would be really helpful for a technophobe since you don't have to worry about compatability issues. Personally, I want my printer to come with a USB cable.

Printer Touch Screen Functionality

The PhotoSmart 626 works with a touch screen that pops up out of the computer. You can navigate your photos using the included stylus or your finger. I found both work equally well. The touch screen makes it simple to crop photos, remove red-eye, and adjust photo brightness. I found the results to be similar to the basic photo editing software that's included with most printers.

If your camera records video, you can even use the touch screen to play the video, although without sound.

My one gripe with the touch screen is that I'd prefer to view the pictures on the large screen of my computer to determine how they're going to look before I print them.

Printing

The prints from this printer are similar in quality to my Canon i560 and my Dell Photo AIO 922 printer. The major improvement is how easy it is to print borderless photos of different sizes. However, you also can't print any photos larger than 5x7.

The HP printer also includes a very cool feature called Get Creative. Use it to draw on photos with stylus, add frames, special effects, clip art, and captions. This is a great feature for anyone who fancies him/herself a scrapbooker and will come in handy when I finally get around to creating those photo books.

Troubleshooting

As I tested this printer I never found cause to refer to the troubleshooting and support section of the user's guide, but I read it anyway and found it to be very simple to understand, which can't be said about many tech products these days.

Discounts

The Parent Bloggers network asked me to mention that you should check Sunday circulars for specials on the printer itself. For 20% off the Photo Books at the HP Home & Office Store, use COUPON CODE: AC8595.