Anybody who needs to print pages bigger than A4 has a limited range of printers to pick from. Prices rise steeply with the increase in printable page size, but HP's Photosmart 8750 Pro can print at up to A3+, while still not breaking the bank.
It's a good-looking printer, with a brushed metal top surface, into which is set a flip-up LCD display that provides status information and indicates which images you've selected for printing.
Unusually for an A3+ printer, HP has included memory card readers for all the common types, except the older SmartMedia. However, the LCD screen is monochrome and therefore won't display a full-colour preview of photos from memory cards.
A clever arrangement of telescopic trays means the Photosmart 8750 Pro doesn't have to occupy a huge space on your desk when printing smaller pages. It can print down to 15 x 10cm, too, and uses a cunning plastic ‘finger’ to push blank photo sheets into the print mechanism, as you close the tray.
This is a nine colour, Vivera-ink printer, adding blue, light cyan, light magenta and triple grey cartridges to the standard cyan, magenta and yellow.
The triple grey cartridge can be replaced with a black one when printing a lot of text pages, but the extra greys produce beautifully rich black and white photos.
On the whole, print quality is of a high order, with plenty of detail in complex images. It does well picking out details in shadowed areas of otherwise bright pictures, which some other printers struggle to show.
Print speeds on large A4 and A3 colour images are good, though for smaller text-based prints, it's not as fast as other printers we've seen.
With nine colours to deal with, you might think the running costs would be high. In fact, they run to around 2p for a page of text and around 65p for a borderless A4 photo.
The Photosmart 8750 Pro is a printer that produces high-quality images at up to A3+, while being both relatively inexpensive to buy and to run. Big pictures needn't cost the earth.
Also consider
Epson Stylus
Photo R2400
The Epson Stylus Photo R2400 is an expensive, yet amazing A3+ printer for the
real photo enthusiast
Rating: 4
Price: £504
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