HP Photosmart B8550 Inkjet Photo Printer

The high points:* Print quality. I was completely amazed by the print quality of this printer, as everyone else has said. Once I'd printed out my first 4x6, I paraded it around the house, showing people and making sure I wasn't imagining how clear and sharp it was.* LCD screen. I didn't expect I'd care about the LCD screen, but it really does make printer maintenance and such very idiot-proof. And hey, eye-catching bright colors are nice too.* Separate trays for photo paper and regular paper. It's nice not to have to constantly change paper sizes.* The printer prints parallel to the edges of the paper! This hasn't always been my experience with HP.* The printer even looks nice. How often do you say that about a printer? I love the glossy finish.The only quibbles I've had so far are tiny, such as:* If I let the printer manage colors, sometimes there's been a bit of a light band at the bottom of various pictures. Letting Photoshop manage colors took care of that.* Occasionally there are tiny tiny spots of white on the otherwise flawless prints. No idea what causes this.* The printer really is big, but I knew that up front, and if the printer has to be this big to make pictures this beautiful and to handle 13x19 pages, then for gosh sakes let it be big.* The printer makes a lot of noise doing various mysterious printer things after you print a page. I don't know what it's doing, but it does it a lot, and loudly.* The included ink ran out quickly, with only light use. Buy the XL size cartridges.* The printer didn't come with a cable to hook it to the computer, and it uses the less-common square USB plug. Luckily I rummaged around and found a spare.* The HP sofware isn't great. It's better than any other HP software I've ever seen, but it's still clunky and buggy. I get an error message every time I shut down because of some sidebar gadget (even though I don't actually have it open on the sidebar).* The usual HP lies about how your ink cartridges are almost empty, and you should be ready to replace them any second! You can print and print long after these messages pop up (again and again). Just keep clicking OK and print until your pictures start looking bad.* And finally, the cropping problem (described in a couple of previous reviews).But, overall, moving from a Deskjet 1000C to THIS? It's like freaking night and day. I may seem to have a long list of problems, but they're really minor. In fact, I take it all back. The printer prints AMAZINGLY, and I don't know about you, but this is really what I look for in a printer.And now for the cropping problem. I've just spent hours sorting this out, and finally I've come up with a workaround. It's not elegant, but at least there is one. (My workaround is for 4x6 images printed from Photoshop [CS4]; you'll have to adapt my method to whichever program you're using.)For best results, do the following.1. Stretch your image's longest dimension to 102%.Yes, it's true, the printer doesn't print at the same proportions you see on your screen. It squashes your image's height just a bit. I know it's the printer, and not my screen, because I drew a perfect square in Photoshop and zoomed in on it and measured it with a ruler, and on the screen it was perfectly square. I printed it on photo paper and then measured the printed square, and the square was now a rectangle.2. Increase your canvas size.Your short side should be 105% of the original size, and the tall side should be 104%. This is to make a thin border around your picture and compensate for the cropping the printer does.3. Preview your picture.Definitely preview it before you print it (there's a setting in your printer properties), this'll save you paper. When the preview comes up, what you're looking for is a white border of a more-or-less consistent width around the edges of your image.4. Print it.You should find that your picture is practically identical to what's on your screen. It still crops the image ever so slightly, but you do want SOME cropping, because without cropping you'd have a white border, and we're going for borderless here. But on my prints, you have to look really close to see that the image has been cropped. MUCH better than the out-of-the-box results.5. Don't save your image!You're only making these changes for as long as it takes to print. You don't want your beautiful image to be slightly stretched with a permanent border.There you have it. I wasted half my pack of HP 4x6 photo paper to find all this out. But I wasn't content with the suggestion of transferring my picture file to a memory card and plugging that into the printer...too much hassle for me (although I'm sure it works just as well). I know my method isn't exactly streamlined, but if you do a lot of 4x6 printing I think you'll appreciate it. And if you're using a program with Actions or Macros you can automate this whole process.By the way, anyone want to buy a few dozen pictures of my 10-month-old daughter?PS. I've noticed the Amazon price is $280. When I bought it in July or so, it was around $190. I wonder why there's been such a big price jump? At Amazon, anyway. (shrug)

I've had this  HP Photosmart B8550 Inkjet Photo Printer  for a few years now and am happy with it. I got it because I wanted to play around with printing my own photos -- do some editing in Photoshop; print; compare to unedited print; tinker some more with color settings etc; reprint; etc etc. All in an effort to learn more. And I also wanted to start to print out some of the thousands of digital photos I have. Even though I always said I would, I somehow never got around to sending those photos out to a print shop to be printed!!! Now, I have many photos printed, framed and bringing me happy memoires at home and at my office!! The color photos this printer generates really are amazing! It would almost certainly be cheaper to get prints done at a place like Costco or Shutterfly, but, as I said above, I just know that the chances I will really get around to doing that as often as I should are slim!!! And you don't really have much control over how exactly they generate the prints.Two caveats: since I read so many horror stories about the software that goes with this printer, I have never attached it to a computer. That was one piece of advice I read when I was researching this printer before I purchased it. Perhaps this is overkill -- and I should say that my research is now a couple of years old, since that is how long I've had this printer. But, I continue to use it standalone -- I stick any photos I want to print on a thumb-drive and print from there. One day, I should probably think about re-investigating the software/printer drive options since in the interim I have upgraded my home machine and now have Windows 7.The other thing I would say most emphatically is IGNORE THE LOW INK WARNINGS. I have printed many, many photos -- including multiple large photos like 8 X 10's LONG after the printer is telling me that the ink is low. LONG AFTER!!!! And the photos look fine. It's truly astounding!! I am sure this is just a trick on HP's part to get you to buy more ink!!! Shame on them -- especially when you consider the environmental impact. Anyway, given the cost of ink cartridges, I consider it worth it to risk printing a crappy photo (which I would have to reprint) than throw out half full ink cartridges. My advice: when you get that low ink warning -- just click OK and get printing!!!