The short: small, fast, minimalist, producing great looking prints.
The whole package is minimalist, compact, and designed to be simple to use: The printer arrives packaged eco-friendly in a reusable tote (made from recycled materials) that's actually nice enough to reuse. There's no driver CD, and minimal setup directions. The ink cartridge is all-in-one. The printer needs only an inch or so clearance behind, and a few inches in front (for the paper guide and output). There's a tuck-away stylus to interact with the touch screen, and a fold-down carry handle.
On powerup, the printer displays a simplified version of the paper quick setup directions, and instructs the user to print a calibration page.
When attached via USB to my WindowsXP system, the printer has an unusual design in which is appears to Windows as a CD drive, from which I did the typical driver installation, after which Windows saw the unit as a printer, not a CD drive. Unfortunately, this base Windows software installation didn't seem to offer an interface to the custom modes available from the touchscreen (eg: passport photo, greeting card, etc).
I've owned other photo printers, including Canon's small dye-sub printer: Canon SELPHY CP510 Compact Photo Printer , and this HP beats all of them in speed, print quality, and color reproduction. For color, primary colors are rich and vibrant, though neutrals (such as earth-tones) and pastels are slightly washed out. Blacks are solid and jet-black. I tested some complicated, textured, outdoor scenes and was very pleased with the results (one sample was a mix of sky, desert dust-storm, and people). The same complicated print took 1m43s at "best" and 43s at "fast normal". Interestingly, the quality difference between the two prints was modest. The "best" print was a little more rich and nuanced in detail, but at 5x7, "fast" seems adequate for most things I'd print.
I tried a couple of the speciality modes, and the printer did "the right thing" in printing passport photos, correctly scaling and sizing them (no more figuring out the DPI to resolution ration to get the exact 2x2 required for passports!). Greeting cards came out well also, though the small number of available designs are limiting.
While I like the printer a lot, I did have some quibbles:
* The inbuilt initial setup is a bit simplistic, and led me to at first not taking the tape off the contacts of my print cartridge (I don't usually use inkjet printers so didn't realize). Interrupting the setup before it was finished resulted in having to go through the setup process again. There's such a thing as "too simplified".
* To use the touchscreen-based modes on the printer I had to put the images on a memory card (presumably a bluetooth-enabled phone would have worked too). I realize many people leave their old photos "on their cameras", but I take a lot of photos, and all my archiving and sorting is done on computers, so the on-card-only design makes the custom modes much less useful to me.
* It would be nice to be able to create custom greeting card designs.
* For some reason the sticky protective cover on my model's LCD wouldn't come off without a lot of prodding and scraping, leaving a mar on the touchscreen. The screen itself has a non-obvious locking mechanism in its popped-up position that has to be pressed in the opposite direction from what I expected. I could see the screen getting broken in a multi-user household
My prints were all on HP "Advanced Photo Paper". Most vendors formulate their inks to match their paper, so the combination typically yields the best results.
Aside from the minor quibbles, I'm very pleased with this photo printer. Highly recommended.Get more detail about HP Photosmart A646 Compact Photo Printer (CC001A#B1H).
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