You wouldn’t be too far off the mark to describe HP’s latest Photosmart Plus as one of the sleekest 3-in-1 printers ever produced. But its quality does not stop with its good looks.

Speed

As far a photo quality is concerned the Plus is up there with the best of them. The same holds true for its print speed. It makes light work of printing colour photos, while regular black printing is done at an impressive rate of 30 pages per minute (draft A4). The copying speed is the same, but do note that it does not contain a document feeder.

Connectivity

Connectivity wasn’t a problem since the Photosmart Plus can be connected to a wireless router, directly from a Wi-Fi enabled PC, or a regular USB connection.

You needn’t even be connected to the device as you can also print directly off SD card, MS, MS Duo, xD cards or PictBridge which also reads USB sticks.  Previewing photos off these inputs isn’t a problem either as images are displayed on its 2.36" touch-screen. This worked a charm and we managed to go through rather large pictures quickly and easily. It doesn’t give you the best preview of your pics, but its adequate for selecting what you want to print.

Problems

We did experience a few niggles though. There’s no way to print photos directly off HP’s Solution Centre, the software for the Photosmart Plus, without having to install Windows Live Photo Gallery, a 58 MB download.  No automatic duplex printing is included, and we also experienced a very messy ink installation. The ad-hoc wireless set-up also turned out to be a frustrating experience.

These problems aside, the fact of the matter is that HP nailed both looks and print quality with the Photosmart Plus. With a RRP of R1699 you do pay a bit of a premium though.