HP Photosmart A826: Photo Kiosk Experience Right at Your Home

Okay, so I've seen the HP Photosmart A826 at a friends' house and the first thing I asked was, "Do you have a photo printing business going on?" After I got over the initial skepticism of seeing a bulky, photo kiosk-like printer inside a home, I got to appreciate this cool looking photo printer from HP.

I've always thought that having a dedicated photo printer is a waste of your hard-earned money. I mean, who prints pictures nowadays? Everything is in Facebook or Flickr, nobody ever prints digital pictures anymore, and with the rising popularity of digital picture frames, I thought that printing hard copies of digital pictures is just a waste of time. But seeing the HP Photosmart A826 and all its cool features and how my friends' house was filled with clear and crisp pictures of of his kids and family, I was tempted to change my mind.

Unlike HP's other Photosmart printers that has a small, box-like design, the HP Photosmart A826 deviates from this design and went all futuristic and egg-shaped looking. It's larger and bulkier than other compact photo printers from Canon or Sony but the large size is to accommodate the large 7 inch screen on the HP Photosmart A826. There's no button outside the HP Photosmart A826, you can access everything on the touch screen, on the front panel of the device, you will see different slots for memory cards and a USB connector. The HP Photosmart A826 is of course an ink-jet printer and though HP markets this product as a "compact photo printer", you will actually find it hard to lug around this thing since it's a good six pounds and measures 10.4 inch in width, 9.6 inch depth and 10.8 inch in height, in other words, it's so bulky that it would definitely show in a backpack.

The HP Photosmart A826 takes good quality colored photos however, when printing darker photos, it doesn't really do a good job printing black colors. I checked under the hood and found out that it has only works with three colors, cyan, magenta, and yellow, it doesn't have a separate ink for black so shadows and darker photos tend to look dull even on a glossy paper. Another thing I didn't like about the HP Photosmart A826 is that it prints pictures so slowly. Printing one 4x6 photo print took about one and a half minutes! I didn't have time to clock how long it took it to print 5x7 prints.

As for the per print cost, HP sells a value pack that includes an ink and paper that costs $35 for 120 photos so that's around 29 cents per print. There are a lot of fun features on the HP A826, you can view your pictures in a slide show and even edit them without a PC. Honestly, the HP Photosmart A826 didn't really change my mind that much about stand alone photo printers, however, if you want to be a cool parent, you should buy this for your kids. My friend's kids was always all over it and they were probably popular in school since every time they celebrate their birthday, kids were all over the device trying to print their photos to bring home.