Digital photo printers come in different shapes and sizes but they all do one thing — transform your brilliantly-coloured digital pictures into high-quality photo prints. HP’s latest printer, the HP Photosmart Premium C309g, packs in many features but still delivers as a well-rounded all-in-one inkjet printer (scans, copies and prints).
The HP Photosmart connects over USB, Ethernet, Bluetooth and Wi-Fi. It takes about a minute to start up and works well with Windows 7 as well as Mac OS. The multifunction printer can read data from memory card and its USB port can read from both flash drives and PictBridge-compatible cameras (Sony, Kodak, Canon etc) and even mobile phones. Since the printer can be connected to the web, you can view and edit your photos directly from Snapfish, an online photo storage and printing service.
You can print photos in different sizes, including wallet, postcard and panoramas. The C309g does have its faults, as it clearly doesn’t have the most impressive print quality in the world. Scans can be initiated from the printer’s control panel to memory cards, flash drives and computers but during our review, we were unable to initiate a scan to a computer connected via Wi-Fi. The C309g has an optical scan resolution of 4800dpi. Loading album thumbnails for the first time can also slow down the printer. It can print up to 15 mono-coloured pages and 10 colour prints a minute.
Photo print quality is good, with sharp details, natural colours and smooth gradations from shade to shade. Colours on the plain paper are generally bright and clean, including from colour copies, where there’s only a slight loss of colour depth. But at a price tag of Rs13,350, the C309g seems like a good all-round printer that’s easy to set up and provides everything you need from an all-in-one home printer.