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You might expect a printer of this size and at this price to print pretty quickly and it does so for larger prints. For simple text pages, admittedly not its specialism, it's not that quick, though, taking two minutes six seconds to complete a five-page test document. The text and graphics test took even longer at two minutes 43 seconds and an A3 version of this document, again printing five copies, took four minutes 22 seconds. Not quick.

The Photosmart needed two minutes 26 seconds to print a 15 x 10cm photo print at best quality, which is pretty slow, but you can select normal quality and get one out in a more reasonable one minute 33 seconds. Finally, the ultimate test, an A3+ borderless print at best quality takes 10 minutes five seconds, a better result.

Print quality from the nine-colour Vivera ink system is very good. The nine colours are C,M,Y, photo cyan, photo magenta, blue and three shades of grey. Our test image was very well reproduced, showing a lot of detail in shadowed areas, which other printers struggled to distinguish. Details in the foreground are extremely sharp and the smooth transition in the sky is also well handled. We can see little difference between normal and best mode prints, so you might as well save time by printing everything in normal mode.

It's not easy to work out the colour running costs of this machine. Black text is fairly straightforward, as you can plug-in a single black cartridge in place of the triple grey one, especially for printing text pages. The cost then comes out at just over 2.02p per five per cent A4 page, which is very reasonable.

With colour, things aren't helped by HP’s reluctance to quote page yield for the triple blue photo or the triple grey cartridges, preferring to just quote 450 pages for the tri-colour one. Use of the other two of course depends on the colour balance of the images you're printing, but without some kind of guidance, all we can do is to assume a worst-case, where all three cartridges are spent at the end of 450 pages. The cost per page is still only 32.6p, though, and that's theoretically for a 45 per cent cover page and with a paper cost of 21.6p. This is an inexpensive printer to run.

Verdict

The Photosmart 8750 Professional is a very versatile printer, which can handle a wide variety of sizes and types of media. It produces very good print at reasonable costs and, unlike most of its main competitors, provides useful facilities for quick photo prints from cards and cameras. At the price, it has a lot going for it.

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