When I first pulled it out of the box and hooked it up, I thought alright, no more 8.5x11 on a crappy printer. I installed and updated the drivers, got every thing set and hit print...nothing! Thought maybe I had missed a step, went back through every thing and hit print again...NOTHING!!! Now I was seriously pissed. I went through all the trouble shooting in the book, the website and the help guide provided. Nothing worked. Decided to call it a night so I wouldn't do something dumb like throw the printer in the dumpster. Ok, next morning I went through the whole setup routine again...still nothing but a test page. I decided to try the HP phone center. I reached someone who I couldn't understand, and they couldn't understand me...I thought this is going to be a painful experience. After a couple agonizing minutes this person speaking another language (I think) transfered me to someone who spoke english! Cool, someone who at least speaks english...to make a long story short, we spent 90 minutes going through trouble shooting to find out that the disk that came with the printer had a bad setup file. I downloaded the one from the HP site and got to start printing...or so I thought. Yes, I could now print text documents but if I tried to change print preferences I would get nothing but a blinking light. So, I called them back and gave them my ticket number from earlier in the day. The tech looked through the notes, listened to what I had tried and then said, "I just went through this with someone else yesterday" Long story shorter, we changed some .dll files and I can print. I just printed out my first 13x19 print and it is amazing. The colors are dead on and the depth is almost 3D. I'm very happy with this printer and with the help that I got from the 2 techs I talked with to get this working. I would have been happier to be able to print right out of the box, but I'm just glad that I can now print. If you get this printer and have problems printing, make sure that you can get a clean copy of the install software. Also if you have problems with the printing and call tech support, ask them about the .dll files. If someone else had written a review with the problems and how to fix them it would have probably svaed me a few hours on the phone.
I hope this helps someone else who would like this as an intermediate priced large format printer.
Click Here For Most Helpful Customer Reviews >>
The B8350 does a great job of printing photos. To test the Vivera inks, I set a photo on the window sill, exposed to sunlight. After over a month, it's still sitting there with no perceivable fading! The photos I printed on my old 1315v would fade from a weekend in the sun.Also worth mentioning is that the B8350 has a very nice quality feel and appearance to it. This is the first ink jet I have owned that does not sound like it's going to jump off of the desk or fall apart when printing in "Fast Draft."
I edited this review to remove my comments about poor text printing quality. I realized that the grayish text was a result of having a photo cartridge in, instead of black! If you purchase this printer, be sure to order some black ink as it only comes with the rgb and photo cartridge. You can imagine how foolish I felt when I realized my mistake. Anyhow, it's GREAT printer!
Best Deals for HP B8350 Photosmart Pro Photo Printer (Q8492A#ABA)
The HP B8350 does a beautiful job of printing on the paper that I use (Staples double sided matte) however I have a few hang ups.It can take up to five minutes just to send the print job to the printer which obviously adds undesired time to a print job and I had some issues with it not wanting to print on larger paper, which is, of course, the only reason I bought it. HP was absolutely no help on that problem and I resolved it myself, but I have no idea how I did that.
I would also like to see more definative communication from the lights and buttons on the front.
Given the price for the quality, I would buy it again.
Honest reviews on HP B8350 Photosmart Pro Photo Printer (Q8492A#ABA)
I would have given this printer 5 stars except for the fact that it does not print directly from a media card, but I can live with that. (I also wish it had included an owner's manual; I don't want to print out 154 pages from the hp website!)I was looking for a printer that would handle paper wider than 8 1/2 inches (I am a scrapbooker) and this model fills the bill for a reasonable price. But its most outstanding quality is its absolutely stunning photo prints! I found things in my photos that I did not know were there. Skin tones are absolutely accurate. And it is speedy. I love my new printer!
Find helpful customer reviews and review ratings for HP B8350 Photosmart Pro Photo Printer (Q8492A#ABA)
I recently purchased a HP B8350 used locally, and for a while I was very unhappy with it. Until I finally got my first high-quality print, and suddenly I was estatic. Once you get it working, the print results are fantastic, rich in color and detail, easily equal to a commercial lab print.It's true that the only Vista driver available is still the Basic one from January 2007. "Basic" isn't quite as bad as it sounds, since it supports several different color profiles for different HP papers, a feature I later discovered was vital. But it's missing features such as manual color calibration and print-head cleaning that are mentioned as driver features in the manual. Presumably those are present in the XP driver.
Printing from Photoshop Elements was clumsy, which is partially the fault of Elements. There's just no graceful way to change the printer options before you print from within Elements, so if I wanted to print at 13 x 19 and I'd last selected 8.5 x 11, Elements would complain that the image would be cropped, and it would lose the new paper size if I changed it and then cancelled the print. The work-around is to change the print preferences from Control Panel before printing.
Printing on photo paper intended for my color laser printer was absolutely awful. The colors were muddy and washed out, the details were fuzzy. Blacks were no more than a dark gray.
It turns out that these printers are very sensitive to specific paper types. When I switched to HP Premium Plus Glossy, the results were night and day. Color went from dark and low contrast to bright with a huge dynamic range, and detail went from blurry to incredibly sharp. Blacks were jet black using the photo ink cartridge in the righthand slot, not the black cartridge. With the right paper, this printer produces lab quality prints. While I'm not normally one for sticking to brand names, photo professional friends told me that printers like the B8350 have inks that are highly optimized for specfic paper charateristics. So if you buy this printer, buy the matching paper.
While there are definitely negative things about the ease of use of this printer, the print quality is absolutely first rate with the right paper. Combine 5-star print quality and 5-star cost for a wide-format printer, and the 2-star annoying things about setting it up and its tendency to be finicky about paper feeding honestly only bring it down to 4 stars. Because in the end, it's the output quality that counts with a printer like this.
Gus
No comments:
Post a Comment