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Being the literal dominating force in the printer market, HP has introduced quite a few printers that have garnered the company top marks. With their Photosmart 1218, HP hopes to cover all bases with a printer to satisfy photo and regular text printing, and in many ways, they succeeded where others have failed before.

Showing it off

HP has some pretty ambitious spec ratings for the printer. 4.7 pages per minute for black, 3.1 pages per minute for colour. 2400 dpi with color layering technology. It features 8MB of memory, and sports some pretty hefty controls on the front cover. At the rear you’ll find slots for Compact Flash and SmartMedia cards, so that you can print directly from your card rather then having to transfer them to computer first. There’s even an IR port at the front so that you can beam your photos from your PDA or laptop. And if you, like this poor reviewer, aren’t hip enough to print straight from CF/SM media or from a nifty PDA, you can still connect using parallel or USB connections.

The Photosmart 1218 can hold around 100 sheets of plain paper, or a dozen or more pages of photo quality paper in its tray. For 4x6 photo prints, you have to use a specialized slide in tray that’s built into the regular tray system. Quality Counts The print quality of the 1218 ranges from the superb to the mediocre, depending on the application at hand. For the most part, we were pleasantly surprised by the quality that this printer can produce, especially across multiple different uses.

For starters, photo quality prints on specialized paper is beautifully reproduced. There is some noticeable dithering, and colours lack the smoothness and richness that we found in the Canon S800, but almost all printers in this price class have similar quality in this respect, and we felt the 1218 performed on par with expectations.

Colour printouts on plain paper were also quite impressive. Graphs and charts had very deep and expressive colours that put the 1218 in the top 3 of its class, but we found black prints to be extremely disappointing. Some of our test prints include white text on black backgrounds, and thick banner like text or thick black banner printouts. In such tests, the printer produced mediocre results that probably would not be acceptable under any serious use. The black lacked uniformity and looked quite mottled. This is definitely a low in the printer’s performance.

The Photosmart did manage to redeem itself when we tested plain text output using regular print paper or HP’s Bright White paper. The results from these tests were quite impressive. Text output was easily some of the best we’ve seen from an inkjet. Legibility was quite good right down to 8pt fonts, and even 6pt fonts were considerably cleaner on the Photosmart 1218 then on many other inkjets. You won’t mistake the text for laser printed facsimiles, but you will appreciate the clean edges and the lack of too many splotches surrounding characters.

Quick to the Punch

The Photosmart 1218 turns out to be one of the faster photo printers we’ve tested in the last few months, and it can make this claim to speed without sacrificing on print quality.

The printer managed to clock around 1 minute 10 seconds for prints on 4x6 paper on normal quality mode. Even at high quality, the same prints took only another 35 seconds or so and averaged around 1 minute and 47 seconds. 8x10 prints took disproportionately longer at just over 4 minute – a number on par with the Epson 890 but far slower then the Canon S800, which still remains our speed champ for photo printing.

For regular text printing on plain paper, the 1218 clocked in at under 17 seconds a page. This baby can churn out text at just about 3.65 pages per minute! Compare that to the Canon S800 and Epson 890, both of which print out around just above or below 2 pages of text per minute.

Catching the Quirks

For the most part the printer works flawlessly. There’s a nifty paper type scanning function, which allows the printer to automatically set paper type by scanning the paper in the tray. This feature is quite cool, but it did seem to be confused once or twice during our tests.

That was of little concern though. We were more peeved by the 4x6 photo insertion tray. While some other vendors allow you to just slide 4x6 photo paper into the regular paper tray, HP’s Photosmart 1218 has a special little tray into which the smaller paper goes. You simply pop the paper into the tray, close the cover, and load the paper into position by pushing the tray into feed mechanism. That’s where the trouble begins. Several times we found that our photo paper (supplied by HP) would jam up because it got caught on something while being pushed in. At other times the paper would not load correctly because pushing the tray into position curled or curved the paper so that it was hard for the pickup mechanism to properly grasp. At other times, the paper just got damaged when it was pushed into its tray. It was a singularly unique experience in frustration, and one which could eventually lead impatient users to shun printing 4x6 photos altogether. We did end up doing quite a few 4x6 prints, but we were forever put-off by the need to be extra careful when loading the paper.

Conclusion

If it weren’t for the printer’s abysmal handling of prints using heavy blacks, the Photosmart 1218 would have been a real champ. The 4x6 tray also put a damper on our enthusiasm, but the use of that tray IS possible if you are willing to take the extra time and care. Photo print quality and speed are on par, more or less, with other printers of this class, but text prints were fantastic and extremely fast. At about $450 on the net, the price is a little steep, but this is definitely a printer worth considering if you are looking for an all-in-one type photo printer that won’t disappoint you in plain text prints.

Overall Score: 78%

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