It's generally true in the printing world that if you need a printer to do a heavy workload then you'll probably need a heavy printer: one look at the packaging that the Photosmart Pro B8850 arrives in tells you straight away that you'll need two people to set it up.

Weighing in at 17.1kg out of the box, you might think that the B8850 bears a remarkable similarity to the Photosmart Pro B9180, which was the first of HP's serious photographic printers to make use of Vivera pigment inks. It has the same solid rectangular shape, centre-positioned forward-thrusting input and output trays, simple control indicators and drop-down cartridge loading compartment.

The coincidence, naturally, is deliberate as this is effectively a cheaper (by £100), no-frills version of the B9180 which dispenses with two notable features to save on price. First, there's no LCD screen so all print settings are handled directly via the supplied software on your PC. Second, there's no Ethernet connection as it's assumed you won't be needing any network input. There is, however, the usual USB port to establish that all-important link to the computer to get you started.

Apart from plugging in the power, your main set-up task is to insert the 8 print cartridges (Photo Black, Matte Black, Light Gray, Cyan, Magenta, Yellow, Light Cyan, and Light Magenta) and 4 print heads, slide in the supplied HP Advanced Glossy Photo Paper and then leave the machine to calibrate for the next half an hour.

As this is a machine designed to handle up to A3+ size paper, there's the same drop-down speciality media tray at the front as the B9180 has, and the paper just feeds straight through and out of the back. The main difference with its predecessor is that the thickness limit has been halved from 1.5mm to 0.7mm but this is only likely to be an issue if you are using especially thick card stock.

The main input tray will hold up to 200 A4 plain paper sheets and one new improvement is that as well as HP's own paper types (you're given Advanced Glossy Photo paper, Professional Satin Photo Paper, Artist Matte Canvas and Smooth Fine Art Paper) you can now add other third-party custom papers.

Other helpful aids include a Photosmart Pro plug-in for Adobe Photoshop users and an automatic printer diagnostic check every 24 hours as long as the power supply is left switched on.

As for photo quality, the results speak for themselves. Even A3+ glossy papers produce sharp focus, excellent tonal balance and authentic colour reproduction and specialists in fine art and canvas surfaces will be extremely impressed with the output on these heavier papers. In terms of cartridge life, each cartridge holds 27ml - around twice that of its rivals.

If you don't already own the B9180, then the pared-down B8850 is the ideal choice for serious photographers working with larger canvases who are on a comparatively limited budget.