5. More Than a Pretty Face: HP PhotoSmart A826

A lot like with the Canon Selphy CP770, it’s the aesthetic of the PhotoSmart A826 that first grabs your attention. With this model, however, we pass into the realm of ink jet printers. This is also the only one of our four printers that uses a touch screen, which is more than seven inches wide! As with all the other photo printers tested here, the menu navigation is particularly straightforward.

On a connectivity level, the HP Photosmart A826 is compatible with PictBridge. The device is also dotted with numerous ports for memory cards: SD and SDHC, CF, Memory Stick, xD, etc.

A printer rich in options

The PhotoSmart A826 offers retouching options, as well as some classic options (rotation, cropping, red eye correction and brightness) and some more original ones (like the ability to make announcements or frames or add special effects). Similar to the Sony DPP-FP95, you can setup a slideshow directly on your screen.

Unfortunately, the printing process for this device takes a long time, which is around one minute and 20 seconds for each image, making it the slowest printer in our tests, along with the Canon Selphy CP770. We should point out, however, that the photos dry almost instantly, which means you won’t mess them up when you pick them up right after printing.

Beautiful photos

The result: these photos look great, with vivid colors that are sometimes a little too bright. As for the black, it borders a little too closely on green in some snapshots, and certain details do get blurred. So this printer isn’t without its faults, but the overall impression it gives off is positive.

You should note that with this device you can also print images in 5x7, which allows you to avoid trimming some of your snapshots -– something that happens all too often when it comes to 4x6. Finally, there’s the portability dilemma. Though the other printers described here aren’t sold with batteries, you can always pop some in for increased mobility. This is unfortunately not the case with this model, which simply doesn’t take batteries!

Our verdict: Printing quality isn’t the issue when it comes to the PhotoSmart A826, which is rich in settings and prints beautiful photos. Unfortunately, it definitely doesn’t merit the name “portable” since it doesn’t take batteries, even optionally. As for its design, we leave you to be the judge of that.