The HP Photosmart 8450 is a connection photo ink - jet pressman that uses up to eight dye - ground inks to print pic with or without your computing equipment .

The 8450 can print flat from just about any case of television camera memory card and also from DirectPrint enabled cameras . To help , the printer has a 2.5 - inch , color LCD to display a thumbnail image of your pictures . Choose the photo , the size of it , quality and quantity of print you desire and advertise the print clitoris .

Printing from your Mac is easy too . The 8450 has a USB 2.0 port for connection directly to your Mac , as well as a 10/100 Ethernet port for connecting to a mesh . Using Ethernet , the 8450 works with Apple ’s zero - configuration networking protocol , Rendezvous , which let you see , pick out and employ the printer without call for to know its IP address . We made a variety of prints both shipway , but discover printing process over Ethernet to be faster than over USB .

The quality of the prints was telling . In fact , the 8450 had some of the cleanest text print we ’ve seen from an ink - jet printer , rivaled only by another HP pressman we recently critique , the DeskJet 6840 ( , April 2005 ) . Most ink - jet printer makers will arrogate “ optical maser - corresponding ” text in their selling material , but this printer actually delivers . picture calibre was also outstanding . The colors in our standard Macworld test image were a well-nigh perfect mates when evaluate it against our match print of the filing cabinet . The 8450 has photo point turned on by default . We institute that it oversharpened photos and so we turned this feature off during our examination . My only ailment about the 8450 ’s photo prints is the paper they ’re print on . Even though the pic look like they ’ve been publish by a photo research laboratory , everyone who picked up the prints commented on the emery paper - like texture on the back of the theme . Also , the edges of 8 - by-10 - inch photo prints had a tendency to loop under , rather than lie vapid .

A mark of our miscellaneous - art mental testing file on unvarnished newspaper indicate near clean lines and nice contingent in grayscale photos , although there were some visible loony toons in light areas of some of the images .

Timed Trials

Scale = Minutes : Seconds

Jury Tests

weighing machine = Excellent , Very Good , Good , Flawed , Unacceptable

Specifications

Macworld’s Buying Advice

The HP Photosmart 8450 is a great choice for those looking for a exposure printing machine to deal over a web . Packed with features , the 8450 prints excellent picture and some of the ripe textbook we ’ve seen from an ink - jet pressman .