Review: HP’s Small, Sweet Photosmart A646 Can Print At Any Party… Or Bathroom
11:59 pm, October 13th, 2009, Eli Milchman
The digital camera has been around for thirty years, and the brilliant scientists who came up with the idea were just awarded a Nobel Prize earlier this month. That’s great, but I still like waving my photos around at parties and plastering them all over the walls of my bathroom.
Luckily, Hewlett-Packard’s petite new portable photo printer lets me print photos at any party or… any bathroom with a power outlet. It’s so simple to use, it’s practically idiot-proof. Plus it’s got Bluetooth, so I can even print from a BT-equipped cell phone. Just so long as that cell phone isn’t an iPhone.
More shenanigans after the jump.
Company: HP
Model: Photosmart A646 Compact Photo Printer
List Price: $149.99
Compatible: Most Mac computers.
Buy Now: The Photosmart A646 Compact Photo Printer is available from Amazon for $149.98 with free shipping.
The HP Photosmart A646 compact photo printer pulls a word out of me I never thought I’d use to describe a printer: fun. It’s diminutive size, breezy-easy controls and good-looking prints bewitch me into compulsively printing photos — for no apparent reason other than the sheer joy of cradling images in my hands.
A darkroom on a rock. Stay tuned for an upcoming review of the waterproof Pentax WS80 lying next to the Photosmart.
And did I say easy? Everything is designed smartly with simplicity in mind — from the touchscreen controls to the way the printer pops open for printing (and the stylish tote with pockets for photo paper and power supply). The printer also comes with a plethora of onboard editing and printing features like borders and blemish removal (whoa), and has the ability to output both 4×6 and 5×7 prints.
The A646's touch screen is big, bright and brilliantly simple.
A really cool feature of the A646 is its ability to print from Bluetooth-equipped phones, which worked great when I tested it with a Sony Ericsson. But here’s the stunner: Apple neglected to include the Bluetooth protocol that enables printing from the iPhone; just another example of the iPhone’s limp Bluetooth functionality (was Steve Jobs bitten by a blue-toothed pirana when he was a kid? We may never know). Pity, because in the right hands, the iPhone is capable of capturing some gorgeous images as CoM’s Giles Turnbull discovered earlier.
All of this is meaningless unless the prints look good — and they do. The photos I printed, on HP’s glossy Advanced Photo Paper, are bright with a bias toward the blue part of the spectrum. The only criticisms are that the prints lack sharp detail and are a little over-saturated. But these aren’t professional-quality prints, and it shouldn’t be expected that they look like such (although I do have a wedding photographer friend who has used HP’s compact photo printers in a professional setting).
A comparison of print quality. Those on the left are from an instant Kodak machine at Walmart; on the right, from the A646. Notice the higher color saturation and bias toward blue from the A646 compared with Kodak's traditionally golden-hued prints.
The prints don’t come cheap. One hundred 4×6 prints from the A646 would cost $55 in ink and paper (using HP’s Premium Photo paper at about $15 for 100 sheets and two $20 HP Tricolor ink cartridges, which are good for about 50 4×6 prints each). Compare that with $28 for the same amount from the Kodak instant printer at Walmart.
If the other kind of green is important to you, HP has perhaps been affected by Greenpeace’s gentle prodding: The printer is energy-star compliant, and about a third of it is made from recycled parts. Plus, the tote is made from recycled plastic bottles.
In the box: printer, case with cool swirly design, power adapter, "introductory" ink cartridge (not shown).
Posted by Eli Milchman in Printers, Reviews | Comment on this article
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The HP is terribly slow 1 minute 30 seconds for a 4 x 6. The print quality is only fair. It has no slot for the Compactflash card for the Canon SLR cameras. Heck, the HP 380 had a slot for the compactflash and 4 other slots. The old HP380 has a better print qualty and prints faster.
Sonny, on November 1st, 2009 at 11:42 pm