HPPhotosmartA646CompactPhotoPrinter(CC001AB1H)

Product Description

HP's latest Photosmart A646 compact photo printer allows direct printing from you camera enabled cellphone via built-in Bluetooth.

Product Details

• Product Dimensions: 4.6 x 9.9 x 5.3 inches ; 3.4 pounds
• Shipping Weight: 6 pounds
• Shipping: This item is also available for shipping to select countries outside the U.S.
• ASIN: B002G1YNXQ
• Item model number: CC001AB1H
  

Technical Details

• Built-in printing from camera enabled cellphone via Bluetooth
• HP Original 110 Ink Cartridge compatibility

Costumer Reviews

Where to begin, this printer has a lot to cover and I'm not going to hit everything.

I think foremost of importance is how does the print quality look. I have 2 other printers to compare the prints with. One is a full size HP D7560 and the other is a Epson PictureMate Dash. I printed the same test picture right from a memory card on each. Comparing the three both HP's look better than the Epson. The HPs were sharper and more colorful than the Epson. Comparing the HPs to each other I'd say the D7560 wins but not by a lot. The 646 picture had more color saturation and the D7560 had less color saturation and a little bit more detail making it look more natural. Between 646 and PictureMate I am going to keep the 646 and sell the PictureMate. The pics aren't perfect with the color saturation but they are good.

I know I could probably tweak the color on the PC of what I send to the Picturemate and make them match but I'm not all about doing that. The Picturemate did print a little bit faster but both are fast enough that it doesn't really matter. The 646 can do 5x7 and the PictureMate can't. Another plus the 646 has over the Picturemate is print head is in the ink cartridge. The Picturemate has built in heads that if you don't print for a while will clog up. At least with the HP if that happens and it can't be unclogged a new cartridge will fix it whereas the Picturemate would probably be shot.

The 646 has built-in Bluetooth which worked well with my Blackberry Tour. The touch screen seems to work well. When you turn on the printer for the first time it will walk you through setup right on the screen which is nice. Interacting through the screen with the printer seems to work well and is nice. You can do all kinds of editing and card making right on the printer if that is what you want to do. That is not my cup of tea but I saw the wife playing with it and she said she liked it and would use it to make quick cards for different things.

My printer came with a quick instructions, padded carry case, power adapter, ink cartridge, some paper, and a stylus. What they did with the padded carry case is pretty cool. It is what the printer comes in. They wrap a cardboard sleeve around it and fasten the zipper together for in the store. Less waste is nice.

There were no software discs. The printer has software built into it for 32-bit Vista and XP. Oh it has MAC OS 10.4 and 10.5 software on it too but I know nobody cares about that. ;-) None of the built in software did me any good as I run 64-bit Vista and Windows 7 RC. I went to the HP website and got the 64-bit Vista drivers to install in Windows 7 and it works fine.

So overall I liked this enough to ditch the PictureMate and although its not perfect print wise I would say if you are looking for a compact 4x6 or 5x7 photo printer with Bluetooth this one should work well enough for what it is.

The short: small, fast, minimalist, producing great looking prints.

The whole package is minimalist, compact, and designed to be simple to use: The printer arrives packaged eco-friendly in a reusable tote (made from recycled materials) that's actually nice enough to reuse. There's no driver CD, and minimal setup directions. The ink cartridge is all-in-one. The printer needs only an inch or so clearance behind, and a few inches in front (for the paper guide and output). There's a tuck-away stylus to interact with the touch screen, and a fold-down carry handle.

On powerup, the printer displays a simplified version of the paper quick setup directions, and instructs the user to print a calibration page.

When attached via USB to my WindowsXP system, the printer has an unusual design in which is appears to Windows as a CD drive, from which I did the typical driver installation, after which Windows saw the unit as a printer, not a CD drive. Unfortunately, this base Windows software installation didn't seem to offer an interface to the custom modes available from the touchscreen (eg: passport photo, greeting card, etc).

I've owned other photo printers, including Canon's small dye-sub printer: Canon SELPHY CP510 Compact Photo Printer , and this HP beats all of them in speed, print quality, and color reproduction. For color, primary colors are rich and vibrant, though neutrals (such as earth-tones) and pastels are slightly washed out. Blacks are solid and jet-black. I tested some complicated, textured, outdoor scenes and was very pleased with the results (one sample was a mix of sky, desert dust-storm, and people). The same complicated print took 1m43s at "best" and 43s at "fast normal". Interestingly, the quality difference between the two prints was modest. The "best" print was a little more rich and nuanced in detail, but at 5x7, "fast" seems adequate for most things I'd print.

I tried a couple of the speciality modes, and the printer did "the right thing" in printing passport photos, correctly scaling and sizing them (no more figuring out the DPI to resolution ration to get the exact 2x2 required for passports!). Greeting cards came out well also, though the small number of available designs are limiting.

While I like the printer a lot, I did have some quibbles:

The inbuilt initial setup is a bit simplistic, and led me to at first not taking the tape off the contacts of my print cartridge (I don't usually use inkjet printers so didn't realize). Interrupting the setup before it was finished resulted in having to go through the setup process again. There's such a thing as "too simplified".

To use the touchscreen-based modes on the printer I had to put the images on a memory card (presumably a bluetooth-enabled phone would have worked too). I realize many people leave their old photos "on their cameras", but I take a lot of photos, and all my archiving and sorting is done on computers, so the on-card-only design makes the custom modes much less useful to me.

It would be nice to be able to create custom greeting card designs.

For some reason the sticky protective cover on my model's LCD wouldn't come off without a lot of prodding and scraping, leaving a mar on the touchscreen. The screen itself has a non-obvious locking mechanism in its popped-up position that has to be pressed in the opposite direction from what I expected. I could see the screen getting broken in a multi-user household

My prints were all on HP "Advanced Photo Paper". Most vendors formulate their inks to match their paper, so the combination typically yields the best results.

Aside from the minor quibbles, I'm very pleased with this photo printer. Highly recommended.