Godfrey DiGiorgi wrote:
It's hard not to like the HP 7960 or 8450 for a cheap, high quality proof printer. It's about the only consumer grade printer that has a factory supplied grayscale inkset for decent B&W printing with little to no metamerism. HP inks and paper are a little pricey, but unless you're printing a tremendous lot it's not out of sight.
I'll echo that. I have owned the 8450 for about a week now. In that time, I've put about fourty sheets of photo paper through it. Well, my wife put the majority of that paper through it, actually. The B&W shots come out very true to what one would expect a B&W print to look like if it were done the old fashioned way.
The color prints are the best I've seen in a consumer-priced printer, and honestly, I think they're at least as good as what I get out of some of the more reputable 1-hour labs, if not better. Its convenience, ease of use, and feature-set are very strong attributes too. And as for ink costs, after printing fourty 8x11 pages of prints (of various sizes, usually several to a page), including several 8x10 B&W shots, we've used up exactly one $25.00 photo-gray cartridge, about 25% of the tri-color cartridge, and about 33% of the photo-color cartridge. The gray went faster because of the B&W 8x10 shots. Maybe once I burn through all of the cartridges once, I'll have a pretty good feel for cost-per-page.
I rely on my old Canon S820 for non-photo printing (text, etc), in order to conserve my HP's inks.
Dave
