HP 8250 printer

Colour and monochrome

I Used the HP 8250 to print a variety of photographs and as per other HP printers found the colours to be larger than life. but nothing objectionable, in fact I liked the majority of colours it reproduced. On the 8750 printer I thought the colours were a bit on the "Brash" side, but after I applied a custom profile these were brought into line. HP seems to have struck a good balance with the 8250 profiles, this printer should please most users.

Strong vibrant colours

You could almost eat these, but HP paper tastes awful

Nearly as good as the real thing

Is there a downside to this printer?

Black and White printing, or to use the correct phrase, monochrome photo printing is not one this printers strengths, it fell below expectations. There was a slight warm cast to the prints, but no doubt with some tweaking you could produce a print that will satisfy you.

Text printing

This printer claims to be the fastest ink jet printer available, and after seeing how this printer spits out text documents I wouldn't argue with this, it is the fastest printer I have ever seen. Plain text documents flew out of the printer - 32 ppm, I had to look twice at this as I could not believe the speed at which the media was coming out - my laser printer is not this fast. However, the fastest speed was only achieved when the documents were printed using Fast draft mode.


Fast Draft mode	Normal quality

Best quality	Normal quality from second page

On the fastest draft mode the quality of the type face is adequate but nothing exceptional, other than the speed at which documents fly out of the printer. In normal mode the type face is very good, although on my document the ink has smudged, this is probably due to media not absorbing the ink quick enough (not HP media). At the best setting the type is near laser quality. Just as a footnote, the second page of normal type was OK (see last picture). I would be more than happy to use this printer as my workhorse printer.