Hewlett-Packard has made its Photosmart Pro B9180 so that it is suited for a large number of users, including professional and amateur photographers as well as graphic designers, advertising agencies and everybody else who needs a fast printer with prints that dry fast too.

Earlier, I covered my handling experiences with this new pre-production unit of HP’s flagship photo printer. Today, I would like to go deeper into the printer’s capabilities with regards to photo printing productivity. Before I discuss my actual experiences and measurements, I should perhaps make it clear the Photosmart Pro B9180 aims at a professional photography market foremost, but is extremely suitable for printing graphic designs and even layouts of small brochures, newsletters…—what I would like to call: small marketing collateral.

A professional photographer has two things on his mind. He wants to spend as much time as possible shooting photographs without having to worry about the printing process afterwards, and he doesn’t want to wait for hours until the prints leave the printer or until they’re dry to the touch. Such productivity considerations are less important to amateur photographers but even they will like a fast printer.

Graphic designers and desktop publishers who want to check their page layouts, proof colours, etc, will need not only a fast printer but also prints that stabilise fast in terms of colour stability.

The print’s longevity is only really important to photographers who want to either exhibit or archive photographs for the longer term.

Focus on Professional Photography

Let’s focus first on HP’s self-proclaimed target market: professional photography. The good news is that the Photosmart Pro B9180 is a fast printer. A fully covered A4 photograph leaves the printer’s inkjet mechanism in well under 4 minutes. A fully covered A3+ takes 7 minutes and 20 seconds.

However, the process of going through the “Print Preview” dialogue in Photoshop CS2 takes a good deal of time. Therefore, HP developed its own plug-in for the Photosmart Pro B9180, so photographers would enjoy one-click printing through an enhanced print dialogue which should take less time and should be less of a hassle to use.

This new dialogue is an automation script which opens a HP specific print panel where you can quickly select all the settings you want to apply to your photograph. The panel worked fine until I installed colour management tools, at which point Photoshop CS2 would crash with each attempt to access it. We shouldn’t forget the printer is a pre-production unit and the software is still very much in beta phase.

Nevertheless, from what I learned earlier on, the new dialogue does speed things up a bit, but its most important benefit is the ease-of-use for the operator to print his photographs.