The HP Photosmart 8450 is Hewlett-Packard’s flagship photo printer. It is an A4 printer with many features that are destined to make photographers’ lives a lot more comfortable. But is the Photosmart 8450 suitable for professional use as well?

The Photosmart 8450 represents a big leap forward to HP in the photo printing market. It is the first printer ever to be capable of printing black and white photographs without having to exchange colour ink cartridges for special black and grey inks. Instead, the printer will automatically use the special HP Photo black and grey inks when confronted with a black and white photograph.

Furthermore, it is the first printer to use HP’s newest inks, which are guaranteed to withstand fading and colour shift over very long periods of time --according to Wilhelm Research, 115 years for some of these inks. Finally, the Photosmart 8450 is an 8-ink printer incorporating HP’s latest research in the area of reproducing digital photographs as closely as possible to silver halide prints.

I will discuss the Photosmart 8450 and HP’s Photosmart 945 camera in a series of articles. I will compare output with what I consider to be a reference printer, the DesignJet 30 of which I still have a test unit installed (and which will also be used to test EFI’s new ColorProof XF). I will start this series by looking at the Photosmart 8450’s behaviour when connected to a Power Mac, printing photographs from a whole series of applications.

Design of the 8450

The Photosmart 8450 is ---in my opinion at least--- an ugly machine. But those bad looks don’t come at the expense of ease-of-use. The machine’s main body part is the metallic grey casing around the moving parts inside. The casing’s top is a sort of car-like hood that opens when applying some soft force on it ---although the hood is far from heavy, there is a hydraulic-feel like mechanism that helps the lid to open completely. The hood holds the dock for 3D, Memory Stick, and all the other formats of memory cards often used in cameras.

Right below the lid there is a PictBridge port. The hood itself also has a large colour LCD screen and a number of buttons. A closer look and a quick browse through the manual revealed that all of this button and LCD abundance serves printing directly from an attached digital camera.

I focused on printing from a Mac first instead. At the back of the device there are the power connector ---a thin cable with a specially designed connector is used to power the unit--- the USB connector for connection to the computer and an Ethernet port. The latter is standard on this machine, a nice surprise for the relatively low price you pay for this flagship product.

I connected the device using the USB connector.

The paper trays are at the front of the machine, with a special photo tray sitting on top of a multi-size paper tray below it. The photo tray can only hold standard-size photograph paper, the bottom tray can hold whatever it is that you’d like to throw at it, up to A4 sheets of paper.

Replacing the ink cartridges is done by opening the hood and unseating the cartridge. The process is very easy to do. Cartridges that aren’t empty yet can be replaced by other cartridges for special purposes like printing black and white prints from a colour photograph. The replaced cartridge is then placed in a sort of cradle which comes with every new cartridge and which protects the cartridge against damage and drying.

The software

HP has a surprisingly complete software suite that installs on a Mac OS X system. The Windows software is equally complete, but that was what I expected. On Mac OS X, you will end up with a tool box, a printing application, a sharing application and some additional software that you really only need if you don’t already own iPhoto, but which is there for good measure (Image Edit, Photosmart Menu, Photo Saver).