Redecorate your fridge with a faster and a better inkjet

The company claims that the first machine with this technology, the HP Photosmart 8250, is the world’s fastest photo printer, capable of printing 32 pages of text a minute and spitting out a shiny four-by-six-inch print in 14 seconds. It would be a big deal if the machine could actually achieve that kind of speed. After all, there are cheaper ways to turn your digital shots into prints, like taking your memory card to a Wal-Mart (15 cents for a four-by-six-inch print) or ordering them online (19 cents each through Apple’s service); prints from the 8250 average 24 cents in ink and paper.

But your time is worth something, too. Instant gratification, without having to drive somewhere or wait for the mail, is surely worth a few extra cents. You can tell just by looking that the 8250, arriving on store shelves this week, is not one of those $39.99 plastic models that scream, ‘‘I’m cheap, but I’ll get you on the cartridges.’’ The printer costs $200. It’s heavy, built like an armored Humvee. There’s a lot of tech in there.

For example, the machine can print directly from your camera’s memory card — no computer needed. The front panel accommodates Compact Flash, SD, XD and Memory Stick formats.

Of course, if you’re going to make prints right off the memory card (or right off the camera, connected by a USB cable), you’ll need some way to choose the pictures. So the printer also has a 2.5-inch colour screen with Previous, Next and Select Photo buttons. The well-written messages on this screen also serve as the printer’s communications channel with you, its proud owner.

The 8250 works well as a traditional printer for printing pictures from programs like Picasa 2 (for Windows) and iPhoto (for the Mac). It can hold letter-size and four-by-six photo paper at the same time. As a bonus, the printer even doubles as a card reader — memory cards in the printer act like miniature disk drives.

None of this, however, is new; plenty of other printers can do all this. The 8250’s advances have to do with how it performs these tasks. For starters, there’s its speed. Now, HP’s marketing department may have been reaching a tad with that ‘‘14 seconds per print’’ business. You get that speed only in draft mode, from a computer (not the memory card), on prints with white borders; edge-to-edge printing always takes longer. That time measurement doesn’t count the seven seconds of thinking the printer does after you hit the print button, either.

Even so, the 8250 can deliver a finished borderless four-by-six photo in less than 25 seconds. That’s still about half or even a third of the time of other photo printers. HP says its speed comes from two clever tricks. First, the actual print head, several inches away from the tanks, has tiny ink reservoirs of its own. It can start squirting ink right away, rather than having to prime itself for a few seconds by wicking ink in from the tanks.

Second, the print head paints a huge swath of the page — over half an inch tall, with 3,900 tiny ink jets firing — on each pass.

The second big advance is a new set of ink-conservation strategies. For HP to claim breakthroughs in saving ink is like a fox declaring that it’s thought up some new ways to guard the henhouse.

— NYT