Most small-format dedicated photo printers are notably easy to set up and use. Almost all of them are suitable for technophobes who just want to print snapshots with as little effort as possible. So when I say that the HP Photosmart A636 Compact Photo Printer ($149.99 direct) stands out as easier to use than most, that's saying a lot. Quite simply, its design includes stellar convenience features that are as welcome as they are rare. Other printers will no doubt catch up sooner or later, but the A636 got there first.

At a casual glance, the A636 looks like a fairly typical small-format printer. It's a little bigger than some, because it's designed to handle 5-by-7-inch photos as well as 4-by-6s and 4-by-12-inch panoramas. Even so, it's easily portable, at 5.3 by 9.9 by 4.6 inches (HWD) and only 3.4 pounds. A built-in handle makes it easy to carry and pivots out of the way when you don't need it. HP also sells a Bluetooth option ($39.99 direct) and optional battery ($24.99 direct), so you can not only take the printer with you, but print photos without a power outlet or cable. According to HP, the battery weighs roughly 8 ounces and can print 75 4-by-6 photos on a full charge.

At the top of the convenience-features list, the printer offers a 4.8-inch touch screen, similar to the one in the HP printer that the A636 replaces—the Editors' Choice HP Photosmart A626 Compact Photo Printer. The central full-color display area measures 3.5 inches diagonally, with a border of control icons on both sides.

The icons are supplemented by menus, which include editing commands to let you (among other choices) crop photos, adjust brightness, add a frame, draw on the image, and create greeting cards using clip-art images stored in the printer. Instead of a red-eye removal feature, you'll find a more sophisticated pet-eye-fix feature that, according to HP, automatically finds and removes both red-eye and the green, white, and yellow equivalents that often show up in photos of pets. (Unfortunately, I didn't have any pet photos on hand with the problem, so I couldn't test the feature.)

Taken together, the icons and menus replace front-panel buttons for giving commands to the printer, and the touch screen effectively turns the A636 into a personal photo kiosk when you're printing from a memory card or USB key. Just as important, the menus and command icons are extremely well designed. This makes the printer not only easy to use, but also incredibly intuitive, to the point of being fun.

Also worth mentioning is the stylus that comes with the printer. It gives you more reliable control over the touch-screen menus than you can get from using your fingers—particularly for tasks like drawing on the image. When you're not using the stylus, you can snap it securely in its slot on top of the printer.

The A636 also stands out for a truly innovative feature: an effortless driver installation. If setting up most small-format photo printers counts as almost trivial, setting up the A636 is trivial. To set up for printing from a PictBridge camera, a USB key, or a memory card, you simply plug in the power cord, snap in the one cartridge, and load paper. To install the printer driver, you connect by USB cable. Period. That's it.

Well, okay, that's not literally true. After you plug in the USB cable, you'll see a window on your computer screen that says the printer comes with software for printing; it then asks you to "Click Start to copy the software to your computer." Next you get a license screen, and then a message that the printer is set up to print. According to the quick-start guide, the automatic installation works Windows XP, Vista, and Mac OS versions 10.4 and 10.5. (I tested using Windows XP.) This is a feature that deserves to be widely copied.

Photo quality for the previous generation of HP's dedicated photo printers was as good as you would expect from your local drugstore. The A636's quality is a noticeable step up from that. It's still not a match for a professional photo lab or for the best inkjet printers aimed at professional photographers, but I didn't see any serious flaws in any of our test photos. The only issue was that some colors in some photos were a bit too punchy, with unrealistically green grass, for example. On the other hand, some people prefer punchy colors to more-realistic but somewhat-subdued color.

The photos also promise to be both rugged and long lived. They were reasonably water- and scratch-resistant on my tests and have a claimed life of 200 years if kept in dark storage, as in an album; more than 50 years behind glass, as in a frame; and more than 10 years exposed to air.

The usual expectation for printers is that every new generation will be faster than the last. The A636, however, has essentially the same speed as last year's A626, which puts it in the unimpressive but acceptable range. Printing from a computer averaged 1 minute 31 seconds for each 4-by-6 on our standard test suite. As a point of comparison, the Editors' Choice Epson PictureMate Dash and Editors' choice Epson PictureMate Zoom both averaged 42 seconds for each 4-by-6.

Compared with its times for printing from a computer, the A636 was a little faster when printing from a USB key and CompactFlash memory card, at 1:23 to 1:29, and a little slower printing from a Canon PowerShot S60 camera, at 1:35 to 1:39. Times for 5-by-7-inch photos from all sources ranged from 1:47 to 2:03. (Neither Epson printer can print 5-by-7 photos.)

The cost per 4-by-6 print for the A636 is 29.2 cents, based on HP's 120-photo print packs, at $34.99 (direct). That's on the high side of the 25-to-30-cent range that most dedicated photo printers fall into, but still within the range. (HP doesn't quote a cost for 5-by-7-inch photos, and there's no equivalent photo pack.)

The HP Photosmart A636 Compact Photo Printer obviously has room for improvement when it comes to speed, but for a photo printer, high quality is far more important. And the ability to print at 5-by-7 and 4-by-12 gives the A636 a significant advantage over printers limited to 4-by-6 prints—which is to say most dedicated photo printers. Like the A626 before it, the A636 offers a far-better-than-average balance between initial price, price per photo, speed, output quality, and convenience features like the touch screen and automatic installation. That's more than enough for it to replace the A626 as the Editors' Choice for high-end dedicated, consumer-oriented photo printer.

Check out the HP Photosmart A636 Compact Photo Printer's test scores.

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