Computing: HP Photosmart Premium Fax C309 – Review – 79

Designed primarily for the home office, HP’s new A4 format Photosmart Premium Fax C309 is a feature-packed device with excellent performance as a photo printer.

Its wireless connectivity meant one less cable cluttering the spaghetti nightmare located behind my computer desk, and the decent scanner made a good fist of the documents and photographs I trialled during testing. The C309 is also able to print automatically on both sides of a sheet of paper (or duplex print, in tech parlance), and those wishing to save on paper costs would be wise to take note of this feature.

Setup was easy, and after about 10 minutes of loading the excellent bundled software, I was up and running and had the C309 connected wirelessly. Printing, scanning and copying then began in earnest.

I was able to print labels directly to CDs and DVDs with a minimum of fuss using the nifty caddy system incorporated beneath the easy-to-read LCD screen/control panel.
The C309 has five dye-based Vivera ink cartridges on board (photo black/black/cyan/magenta/yellow) so there is no need to change black cartridges when swapping from text to photo printing.

Paper handling capacity is reasonable, but since the C309 can hurtle through black and white printing at 33 pages per minute, the 50-sheet output tray is going to need a lot of attention from the user.

It’s quite a bulky unit but the fashionable cream and grey aesthetics blended well with my Mac-based office.

Armed with a fresh pack of HP Premium Plus 280gsm photo paper, I set about reproducing some of my favourite photos, a variety of high-resolution and not so hi-res TIFF and JPEG files. Printing a bordered A4 took around five minutes – a touch on the slow side but the printed result was very good.

The C309 acquitted itself very well; my naked eye couldn’t perceive any sort of dot structure, while colours were well rendered and natural. Because it is basically a CMYK device (no RGB or orange/green – what did you expect?), vivid fluoro-like colours from flowers and insects were slightly muted. But ultimately the Photosmart Premium Fax C309 is a potent, feature-packed home office printer with a good level of photo printing performance.

More: www.hp.co.nz