Review: HP Photosmart Plus Edition Model B209A

The installation process is pretty straightforward for this printer. You just pop in the CD and follow the on-screen instructions. You will have to connect the printer to a computer during the install process, and from there you can configure it to work with your wireless network and enter any passwords. The entire install process took about ten minutes on an Acer Netbook, and that’s because it installs all the drivers plus a program called HP Solution Center that handles all your scanning, too.

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This printer can print up to 30 ppm (pages per minute) in a reduced quality ‘draft’ black color, or up to 15 ppm at normal quality. For everyday printing, the draft quality is fine and will save your ink consumption. Color printing ranges from 1ppm at the highest quality to up to 28 ppm in draft quality. These numbers are fairly standard for when it comes to inkjet printers. Black and white print quality goes up to 600 dpi, and color printing can go as high as 4800 x 1200 dpi, which makes it great for printing full color photos on photo-quality paper.

Once you configure the printer to work wirelessly, it works exactly the same as it would if you had the printer connected via a USB cable. Whether you are printing color images or scanning documents, there doesn’t even seem to be any speed issues involved. I was quite amazed by how effectively it worked over the wireless network. Even scanning full page color images took just a few seconds to scan and import into the PC, then I could save the documents to PDF using the HP Solution Center software. That is such a nice feature.

If you have a wireless network in your home or office and need a good printer, you should check out the HP Photosmart Plus Edition Model B209A. It’s easy to use and packed with tons of great features, plus you can always rely on HP quality.