More options - printing and uploading

By CHRIS BARTON

Burning to CD is not the only way to get your digital snaps off your computer. Printing and uploading to web sites are two other options.

I tested both using Hewlett-Packard's new Photosmart PS7550 for the printing and the handy photo and imaging software that comes with the printer to upload.

The PS7550, which is due to go on sale here at about $999 in September, is an extraordinary printer.

Not only can you use it to print directly without hooking up to a computer, but it also comes with three ink cartridges - meaning it's great for ordinary text as well as photos.

The direct printing is made possible by a series of slots for any type of digital camera card and, if your camera has the software, by plugging it directly into the printer. I used a 32MB SD card which the printer instantly recognised.

I could then scroll through each photo on the printer's LCD, crop and adjust the pictures and then print. The PS7550 has a nifty A5 paper tray for HP's Colourfast photo paper (about $20 for 20 sheets) allowing instant borderless postcard prints - great for birthday parties.

Twenty sheets of Colourfast A4 paper costs around $35, allowing you several prints of various sizes on the one page.

My only grumble was there was no way to do borderless prints on an A4 sheet - a feature standard with Epson's competing Stylus Photo 895.

What that means is more cutting and some paper wastage when you're trying to get four postcard prints to a page - and at the price of photo paper you want to use every bit.

But the PS7550 produced brilliant results - so good I couldn't really tell the difference between its second-best "PhotoREt 4" prints and the top-of-the-line "4800x1200 optimized dpi".

They both looked marvellous to me - the only difference being the latter took longer to print.

Much of this printing quality comes from the printer's seven inks in three print cartridges - black, tri-color and photo.

So, as well as stunning, true-to-life photos you can - thanks to the black cartridge - print text too without chewing through expensive photo ink. In effect, you get 2 printers for 1.

HP's photo and imaging software is great for editing, cropping and fixing red eye on your prints. But it's also brilliant for uploading photos for storing on web sites.

There's a huge number of these to choose from - with many such as hp photo and ofoto offering a range of free and paid- for services.

In the end I chose MyFamily.com which gave me 5MB of storage for free and promised to create a web site for me in three minutes, the only downside being an excessive amount of advertising.

HP's software made it a cinch to upload photos - automatically cutting them down from 500KB to a more manageable web size.

The only problem now is our globe-trotting family want me to upload more and I'm running out of web space.

hp photo

ofoto

MyFamily.com