Digital Trends

HP Photosmart 7760

March 16th, 2004 | by Rob Curtis

Testing and Performance

Performance of the printer was on par with the current crop of home and small office printers and printed a variety of text documents from multiple applications (Microsoft Word, Excel, and Adobe Acrobat) with ease.

Getting the best print quality output may require the user to swap the black cartridge for the photo cartridge. While easy to do, it can become quite annoying for those users that often switch between text printing and graphics or photo printing. To somewhat ease the pain HP has provided a cartridge holder and docking space for the spare inside the cartridge bay. That annoyance aside, the text was crisp and black with no fading or jagged edges and the graphics have sharp color contrast and crisp lines and edges. 

While the 7760 performed well with text printing it really shines when printing photos. Our testing of the printer focused on photo printing in standalone mode.  Using the built-in memory card reader and our Sony 64MB Memory Stick we were able to easily scroll through all the pictures on the card.

The LCD screen, while small, was good enough for us to crop, zoom and rotate our pictures without the need for any intervention or enhancements from a computer. There are some enhancement features built in like brightness, contrast and the ability to add frames, color effects and a date/time stamp. We were also able to select print quality and number of copies through the menu interface. Photo editing software is much more powerful than what you can do on this LCD screen; the editing options on-board are fairly limited but they do work as intended.

HP's documentation on the printer states that you can print a 4x6-inch photo “in as fast as 36 seconds.” Of all the printers we've tested, we've never been able to substantiate the speed claims of the manufacturer; perhaps they use a special test file that is known to produce fast results. In any event, the 7760 does print pretty fast.