by Regardt van der Berg | SACM
07 July, 2008
When it comes to photo prints, A3 and smaller, very few printers currently available come close to the HP B9180
This printer first grabbed my attention at last year’s HP Labs in Lisbon, Portugal, and I have been dying to try it out ever since.
What sets this printer apart from almost anything else on the market today is the size of prints it can produce and the fact that it is aimed at a professional market. This means that the colour accuracy and overall print quality are nothing short of superb.
Moreover, I was blown away by the large variety of media that the B9180 can print on. This includes glossy, satin, and matte photo paper as well as film, transparencies, banners, and my personal favourite, canvas (special fabric used by painters).
In fact, at HP Labs last year, I printed one of my best shots from my Portugal trip on canvass and the results were simply out of this world.
Considering that this is an A3 printer, it’s no surprise to find that this printer is large and heavy, but it will be right at home in a studio environment thanks to its curvy features and neat aesthetics.
It’s also not strange to see that this printer makes use of eight ink cartridges to produce its professional quality prints. Apart from the standard colours (cyan, magenta, yellow, and black) it also makes use of light cyan, light grey, light magenta, and photo black to produce images only equalled by those produced by photo-lab developers and which cost hundreds of thousands of rands.
Even though this is a professionalgrade printer, it’s still pretty straightforward to install and operate. Its drivers support both Windows and Mac OS and you can hook it up to your PC or put it directly on your network via the built-in network port.
Impressively, the paper output-tray is partly made of metal: this simply emphasises the fact that this printer means business. It also boasts a manual-feed paper slot that can accommodate media up to 1.5mm thick.
Probably the most impressive feature on offer is the internal calibration system. An HP densitometric closed-loop colour calibration integrated into the print head is able to measure the colour values of a test image.
It will then compare these values to that of the values loaded at the factory and it will auto-calibrate should any changes be detected.
During the two weeks that we used this printer, there was very little to find fault with it. It worked like a charm and consistently produced great photos.
While this printer might be a little expensive for home users, it guarantees a quick return on investment for photographers and designers.
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