HP Photosmart Premium Wifi Printer

Early last month one of my lovely blogger friends recommended me to Hewlett Packard for a project they are doing to see how families use their printers within the home. Frankly I think she doesn’t know a bigger geek than me, so it seemed an ideal fit!

So kindly HP have sent me a HP Photosmart Premium, all-in-one printer/copier/fax machine for a couple of months, so we as a family can evaluate it. Bear in mind it’s our household we’re talking about, we’ve had an all-in-one printer for years. So I was a bit scepical about it, after all what could it possible do that my old one couldn’t? We pride ourselves on rarely printing anything, that’s for non-techies who need to print out every e-mail they’re sent (for people who do that please stop it, it drives your tech support nuts!).

Oh my how wrong I was!

It’s hard for a gadget to impress me these days, I was an IT Manager with a ridiculous budget for buying new toys on a regular basis and it makes you a bit blase. But I have to give credit, where credit is due this little machine rocks!

The reason? It has Wifi built in..

I didn’t realise was the reason we weren’t printing was it was a pain. The built in Wifi means I can print from any room in the house. I don’t have to fiddle around with cables to attach it to any of our laptops and I can instantly print photos from my beloved iPhone (just add a free download from the App Store to your phone and away you go). Oh and you can scan an image or a document on the printer, which then instantly add’s itself via Wifi into my iPhoto programme on my Mac or My Pictures on Windows.

It was a cinch to install it (as usual far too much packaging but that’s all printers!) and to set up the Wifi or Bluetooth should you choose to use that from a regular mobile phone. There are the standard slots for memory cards and a cute little screen to see your images on before you print them. So I’ve printed school work, colouring pictures from Cbeebies & Nick Jr for Lily, more photos than I usually do in a year, behaviour charts, work documentation, and holiday information. I’ve been scanning pictures like there’s no tomorrow. I’ve had such a great time with it!

The only thing I’ve not been able to test is the fax as our phone line is miles away from a power source which is a real shame as we’re actually needing to use one at the moment so it would have come in handy but that’s our fault. And I’ve just noticed there is a simple forms button, I’m going to have to play with that as well.

On the upside one of my main gripes about HP (I’ve supported their printers for 13 years!) has always been the price of the cartridges. But for this model I’ve just had a surf and you can replace the whole lot for £34 from Argos which isn’t terrible considering how much it can do.

I only have a couple of bad things to say about it, one is the price £250 is a lot for a home printer and the other is it’s pretty big (see the above picture of it on my small side table). If it were staying I’d make room for it in the office as it’s a hefty bit of kit for just leaving out in the home if you don’t have that much space. But that aside, all in all……I love it….. I don’t want to give it back….I’m really hoping that they forget they lent it to me, but if they take it away it’s instantly going on my Christmas list, I don’t think I can live without it now!