HP 7960 Ink Jet Printer

Tonight I picked up an HP 7960 ink jet to use as a photo printer. What a horrible experience to get it to work with Mac OS X. It didn't help that my blood pressure started rising as soon as I ran the installer. It's one of those completely brain dead things that makes you quit all applications before it can continue. I hate, hate, hate that, argh, did I say I hate that? It's absolute lazyness on the part of the developers and it's disgusting for a company like HP.

Anyway, after the installer finished it kept bitching at me about one of the cartridges not being installed right. Each time you remove and reinstall a cartridge the printer insists on calibrating. So I'm removing, re-installing, calibrating, removing re-installing, calibrating and it just wouldn't work. Finally after the fourth time I did manage to get the cartridge seated correctly. Ugh, well then trying to print just didn't work. I could print a test page from the HP utility, but printing from another application didn't work. No error, just stopped the printer jobs. So it's off to up grade the driver and after a 15MB download and another trip through the installer the printer finally works. What an absolute pain in the ass.

However .... now that it works, it's a thing of beauty. The main reason I bought it was to print black and white and man can it print black and white photos. All the other printers I have, use color inks to print black and white photos and this leaves the photos with a color cast, usually some shade of green. You can compensate to improve the situation, but in the end they're never really right. The HP has a special photo grey-scale cartridge that is used when printing black and white photos and it works wonders.

I've become rather partial to matter paper so I started out using HP premium plus matte photo paper and the picture looked incredible. But I also just tried some premium plus glossy and the picture is absolutely stunning. Although on the glossy paper there are wheel marks. Crap, if that's a persistent problem it's going to drive me crazy. Every single printer I have has some problem that makes me unhappy with it's prints. Being a perfectionist really sucks.

Posted by Kimbro Staken