Review: HP Sprocket Studio Photo Printer

http://www.techgadgetscanada.com

Follow me on Twitter & Instagram @ErinLYYC
Looking to get your fabulous photo memories off your smart phone and out into the world? A photo printer is a great idea. While many every day home office printers do have photo printing capabilities, they can eat up a lot of ink. Having a dedicated photo printer is a nice alternative that lets you print lots of great quality photos easily, without also needing to feed sheets of photo paper into the printer. I’m Erin TGC and I had a chance to review HPs sprocket studio printer. Here’s what I liked, what I didn’t, and whether I’d recommend it to you.
What is HP Sprocket Studio?
The HP sprocket studio is a compact mini printer for printing photos. That it’s only job! Well the printer is small, it’s not what I’d call compact. The printer has a connected tray where your photo paper is stored, so the overall effect is kind of long and bulky. Even so, this printer would easily fit in a laptop bag or tote if you did want to take it with you somewhere.

What’s in the box?
In the box you get the printer, cable, and a sample pack of 10 photo paper sheets and a small roll of ink toner.

Getting things going with the HP sprocket studio photo printer is pretty easy. Plug it in, and let it power up. You’ll need to load dedicated 4“ x 6“ photo paper into the tray.

The first time you open the app, you’ll need to pair your phone to the printer using Bluetooth. The app will walk you through it, as it did for me, and I was connected in seconds.

Printing is easy using the app. The app will pull in the photos from your phone, or tablet, wherever you have it installed. Choose the photo you want, and then you can make a few adjustments, tweaks, or enhancements to the photo before you print it.

You’ll then hit the small printer button on the app to begin printing. A word of warning here: it takes almost a full 25 seconds before anything will start to happen on the printer. The first couple of times I used this printer I thought nothing was happening so I kept hitting the print button. That resulted in many duplicate photos accidentally and unnecessarily.

Normally that wouldn’t be a problem, however the special ink cartridges that are used in this printer only print a maximum of 40 Photos per cartridge. So you’ll want to take care.

The full printing process is not exactly quick. It takes a couple of minutes for a photo to be fully ready; about 1 minute 25 seconds to print out when I timed it, plus the time it takes to initiate, another 25 seconds.

How’s the photo quality?

While the printing process may take some time, and seem a little involved. The photo quality overall is outstanding. The photos are colorful, crisp, and detailed. Definitely high-quality! I can’t find a single bad thing to say about the overall photo quality.

The prints are, as HP promises, bright, glossy photos that are smudge-proof, instantly dry, water-resistant, and on thick, tear-resistant photo paper.

The photos do print out with white borders at the edges. I’m not sure why, I measured the photo paper, and the truth is, the sheets are actually substantially larger than 4 x 6. So what actually gets printed is just the 4 x 6 area.

The photo paper that HP recommend to use with this device, actually has breakaway sides that are perforated, so you will just snap these off after they’re printed, and you should have a tidy finished product. Despite the fact these are tearaway perforated edges, they do seem to break off rather cleanly and give the photos a tidy look.

Let’s talk print cost.
A box of 80 sheets of photo paper, and two cartridges is about $50.

That works out to cost you about $.63 per photo. Not bad. Some printing gadgets have paper that costs a couple of bucks per photo, so this seems like a much more economical choice.
Overall I quite liked this printer. It’s a fast, easy way to print lots of photos, and the photo quality is really great. The print cost is low and set up and operation was easy. Its biggest downsides? Probably the slightly awkward shape. It would be nice if it was more compact, but I imagine HP’s engineers had a good reason for the design. It’s also pretty slow to shoot out a single photo, taking almost 2 minutes from press to print.

The HP Sprocket Studio sells for about $179 and you can get it from places like Best Buy and Amazon.

Видео Review: HP Sprocket Studio Photo Printer канала Erin Lawrence