» HP B8350 Photosmart Pro Photo Printer (Q8492A#ABA)

HP B8350 Photosmart Pro Photo Printer (Q8492A#ABA) Reviews

Customer Rating:
Summary: Proud Owner!!!!
Comment: Well, i was in the market for a large format printer, just like most of you. I actually found a Brother printer for $[...] here on Amazon and wanted to see if my buddy at Bestbuy can get a deal on it. Unfortunately, Bestbuy did not carry it. He did, however recommend this from HP. HP was my first choice of printers, but the ones i have found was not in my price range..until now. I ordered one because of the awesome price and was excited. Then i started reading all the horror stories about the drivers and it not working and dealing with non English speaking tech guys.
Well, obviously i read all reviews bad and good and learned to download directly from the HP site so i did. I plugged the power in, plugged the USB cord in, installed the VISTA 64 drivers(yes, im running Vista 64)and BAM! Everything worked!!!! I started with a test page off of notepad and 8.5x11 and printed perfectly. I then opened up Photoshop Cs2 and printed up an 11x17 poster of my artwork in FULL COLOR with the supplied photo paper. Let me just say...It is the best inkjet printer i have ever owned. And i have owned quite a few. So, with all the horror stories in the past, it looks like HP fixed all issues..even if you are running Vista 64! What a deal and what a great product! Thanx HP!

Charlie B
cfxpaintworks.com

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Customer Rating:
Summary: Two quick fixes to get this printer to work
Comment: This printer did not work for me at first either. It would only print plain paper in default mode. Two fixes mentioned in earlier reviews saved the day.

1) The software that shipped was no good. I had to install the drivers from HP's website.

2) Replace 2 dll files as stated on HP user forums:

Two Windows DLL were replaced ( maybe by Office 2007 or Visio 2007 ).

This were the files:
c:\Windows\system32\spool\drivers\w32x86\3\UNIDRV.DLL
c:\Windows\system32\spool\drivers\w32x86\3\UNIDRVUI.DLL

I have copied back the original files from c:\Windows\Driver Cache\i386\sp2.cab

After doing these two things and rebooting, the printer now works and I don't have to toss is out the window as I was inclined to before this fix.
HP tech support was no help. I was on the phone with someone who spoke very broken English troubleshooting for 4 hours. No mention of this apparently common problem. Bottom line - I have a working printer now but it should not have taken so much effort to get it working.

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Customer Rating:
Summary: Dont buy this printer if you use Adobe Photoshop!!!
Comment: This printer is hands-down the absolute worst experience I have ever had with any purchase!! It absolutely, positively does not work with Adobe Photoshop (any version). What is the use of having a pro photo printer if it is not compatible with Photoshop!! I actually returned this printer, because HP said I got a bad unit, only to have the exact same problem with the replacement unit!! After hours on the phone with "tech" specialists from India, they finally admitted that none of thier Pro printers work with Photoshop. They have a new one out...the B9180 which comes with the Photoshop plug-in so you can use with Photoshop, but at a $700 price tag...give me a break. HP actually had the nerve to tell me that this was Adobe's fault not theirs. How ridiculous....considering that every other photo printer on the planet works fine with Adobe's line of software. I actually have a $99 Epson photo printer...which could run circles around this expensive piece of junk!!! Do yourself a favor...buy an Epson.

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Customer Rating:
Summary: Great images, but a flawed printer in many ways
Comment: I recently purchased a HP B8350 used locally, and for a while I was very unhappy with it. Until I finally got my first high-quality print, and suddenly I was estatic. Once you get it working, the print results are fantastic, rich in color and detail, easily equal to a commercial lab print.

It's true that the only Vista driver available is still the Basic one from January 2007. "Basic" isn't quite as bad as it sounds, since it supports several different color profiles for different HP papers, a feature I later discovered was vital. But it's missing features such as manual color calibration and print-head cleaning that are mentioned as driver features in the manual. Presumably those are present in the XP driver.

Printing from Photoshop Elements was clumsy, which is partially the fault of Elements. There's just no graceful way to change the printer options before you print from within Elements, so if I wanted to print at 13 x 19 and I'd last selected 8.5 x 11, Elements would complain that the image would be cropped, and it would lose the new paper size if I changed it and then cancelled the print. The work-around is to change the print preferences from Control Panel before printing.

Printing on photo paper intended for my color laser printer was absolutely awful. The colors were muddy and washed out, the details were fuzzy. Blacks were no more than a dark gray.

It turns out that these printers are very sensitive to specific paper types. When I switched to HP Premium Plus Glossy, the results were night and day. Color went from dark and low contrast to bright with a huge dynamic range, and detail went from blurry to incredibly sharp. Blacks were jet black using the photo ink cartridge in the righthand slot, not the black cartridge. With the right paper, this printer produces lab quality prints. While I'm not normally one for sticking to brand names, photo professional friends told me that printers like the B8350 have inks that are highly optimized for specfic paper charateristics. So if you buy this printer, buy the matching paper.

While there are definitely negative things about the ease of use of this printer, the print quality is absolutely first rate with the right paper. Combine 5-star print quality and 5-star cost for a wide-format printer, and the 2-star annoying things about setting it up and its tendency to be finicky about paper feeding honestly only bring it down to 4 stars. Because in the end, it's the output quality that counts with a printer like this.

- Gus

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Customer Rating:
Summary: Excellent large format printer at a great price
Comment: I still can't believe what a great buy this printer was - it was purchased to service a temporary on-location production office but ended up sending back home to our office in New York when we finished with it on-site because it did such an outstanding job. Superb quality! Great buy for design and creative services businesses - would be excellent for home office use also.

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