Most A3+ printers cost many hundreds of pounds and are designed for use by printing professionals who, it's assumed, don't need the ease-of-use facilities lavished on consumer printers. This is daft, as graphics professionals often have to print shots from digital cameras, either via a PictBridge connection or from memory cards.

HP has gone half way towards accommodating these needs with the Photosmart 8750 Pro. While it doesn't have a colour LCD display, which you could use to show thumbnails of your pictures, it does have slots for all the common memory card types, including MicroDrive, but not SmartMedia. There's a PictBridge socket, too.

Flip a small panel at the back of the top surface of the printer and up pops a mono LCD display. While this isn't as immediately useful as a colour screen, it probably makes more sense when purchasers of the printer are likely to have manipulated their images using something like Photoshop before printing.

They will have less need for printing straight from a digital camera, but may still find it useful occasionally. For these times you can print a sheet of thumbnails and select the images to print from there.

The Photosmart 8750 Pro is a nine-colour machine, using three tri-colour cartridges. There's a standard cyan, magenta and yellow unit, supplemented by a blue one - with light cyan, light magenta and blue inks - and a grey cartridge containing three shades of grey. The grey cartridge can be substituted by a straight black one if you're printing a lot of text. There's a neat storage chamber for the tri-grey cartridge inside the printer when it's not in use.

The feed and output trays are both telescopic, so you can adjust them for different sizes of paper. This means your printer doesn't have to take up a huge desk area when printing on smaller paper sizes. The Photosmart 8750 Pro can handle photo prints down to 15 x 10cm (6 x 4-inch) and uses an ingenious plastic finger to push small photo paper blanks deep into the printer.

Despite incorporating three different ink cartridges, the printer is economical to run, with a 45 percent coverage, A4, colour print costing 32p. It's also easy to maintain and the quality of printed images, as you might expect, is very high. There's plenty of detail for less well-lit areas of your photographs and if you need to print black and white, you can expect particularly neutral prints, thanks to the three grey inks.

Verdict
For anybody needing to print larger than A4 images on a reasonably regular basis, the Photosmart 8750 Pro represents very good value and offers excellent print quality. The ability to print from memory cards or directly from a digital camera is a useful extra on a medium-format printer like this.

Company: HP

Contact: 0845 270 4000

Tags: pictbridge printing printers microdrive liquid crystal display color multifunction printer ink cartridge