HP Photosmart D7360

With a simple tap of the touch screen on HP's Photosmart D7360, you can print color photos in a snap. Insert your camera's media card in one of its reader's four slots, and the on-screen wizard will walk you through the printing steps.

The wizard lets you browse your images on the 3.4-inch color screen, perform simple editing operations, select which pictures to print, and choose the paper size. It also helps you print images stored on a USB device connected to the direct-print port.

The D7360's handy touch-screen menus also make setting up and maintaining the printer easy. You can even view animated demos of maintenance tasks, such as loading paper and cartridges, and clearing paper jams. The main paper tray holds up to 100 sheets of letter-size paper, and a second tray holds 4-by-6-inch snapshot paper. Options include an $80 duplexer for double-sided printing, as well as a $60 Bluetooth adapter for printing from camera phones and PDAs.

When you connect the D7360 to your PC and touch 'Save' on the screen, the bundled software launches and helps transfer your images to the computer. The printer comes with the full version of HP's Photosmart Premier, a convenient package that lets you organize photos into albums, edit them, print them, and share them through HP's Snapfish Web site.

In our PC World Test Center tests, a shipping D7360 printed 5-by-7 photos at a moderately brisk 1.1 pages per minute. Most users will like its photo quality, but we've seen better. On photo paper, the darkest areas lacked some detail and exhibited a bluish tint, while skin tones looked too bronzed. Black-and-white prints had very smooth tonal gradations, though. On plain paper, text and line art were slate gray instead of black, and color photos lacked brightness and shadow detail.

The printer comes with six individually replaceable ink cartridges that are separate from the printhead. HP calculates that 4-by-6-inch prints cost as little as 24 cents each when you buy a $36 value pack (a full set of ink cartridges and 150 sheets of photo paper).

At a street price of $200, the D7360 is exceptionally easy to use and has the best software bundle in the business. But its image quality is merely good, and plain-paper printing is clearly not its strong point.

Paul Jasper