How does the Photosmart 8450 perform when directly fed from a HP Photosmart 945 digital camera? Which are its capabilities? We tested and found the Photosmart 8450 even better when printing directly from a camera. Ease-of-use is the number one issue here. Professionals and semi-professionals will prefer printing from a Photoshop equipped computer.

The Photosmart 945 camera is HP’s top consumer digital camera. It is a camera that has many options as standard. For example, you can let the device work out everything fully automatic for you, or you can choose for some aspects to be controlled manually. There’s an optical zoom and a digital zoom option as well. The latter is not really a zoom; it just frames the photograph differently, giving the impression of zooming in. The camera’s quality is good, but not exceptional. Here as well, ease-of-use and the fast ability to shoot pictures has been paramount in the design of the camera.

The camera has all the interfaces you may expect, including PictBridge and USB. When connected to the Photosmart 8450 photo printer, the camera allows you to download selected photos to the printer ---all of this is selected and activated on the printer control panel, complete with visual feedback on the LCD screen.

Printing directly from a camera like the Photosmart 945 is a no-brainer process. The user selects the right paper size, the photo organization on the paper from the control panel and hits OK. The photographs are output using the Best setting of the printer. The result is photographs without any visible shifts in colour and with the sharpness and detail you associate with silver halide prints.