Every so often, I get to play with—uh, test—something new and different. The HP Photosmart A826 Home Photo Center ($249.99 direct) is a prime example. Think of it as a photo kiosk for your kitchen (or anywhere else you like). Modeled on the sort of kiosk you can find in your local drugstore, the A826 lets you plug in a memory card or USB key, then submit orders through a 7-inch touch screen while previewing photos at 4.2 inches diagonally—an enormous size by home photo printer standards.

The A826 can print standard-format photos at sizes up to 5 by 7 inches and panoramas up to 4 by 12 inches. As you would expect from most any dedicated photo printer, it can print from PictBridge cameras and computers, too, but then you don't get to use the touch screen. The screen is shaped like a trapezoid with rounded corners, roughly 7 inches across the bottom, 5.5 inches across the top, and 4 inches high. Control icons on the left- and right-hand sides set off a 5.6-inch full-color display area and let you do things such as scroll through the photos or give the print command.

The size of the touch screen dictates a relatively large size for the printer. Fortunately, the A826 is less imposing than its 10.8- by 10.4- by 9.6-inch (HWD) measurements would suggest. It feels smaller, because it's smaller at the top—only 3 inches deep—than at the bottom. To print, you have to open the paper tray, which takes up an extra 5 inches in front. When you're not printing, you can fold up the tray to get it out of the way and, incidentally, let it serve as a dust cover. It also helps that the printer is light for its size, weighing only 5.5 pounds.

According to HP, the print mechanism in the A826 is, aside from a slightly different paper feed, the same as the one in the HP Photosmart A626, a smaller printer with a more conventional—which is to say portable—design. So it's not surprising that setup is standard fare for a small-format photo printer. Plug in the power cord, install the one ink cartridge, load paper, and you're ready to print. If you want to connect to a computer, you can also run the automated installation program and plug in a USB cable.

The touch-screen menus work the same way, whether you're printing from a memory card or a USB key. More important, they're designed well enough for most people to figure them out without having to read any instructions. Plug a memory card or USB key into the appropriate connector on the front of the printer and the A826 will read the files into memory and show the images on-screen in thumbnail format. You can scroll though the thumbnails and pick photos to print, or touch a photo to see it at full size, and then scroll through the full-size photos. I found using the provided stylus to be a much more reliable way to select menu choices than touching the screen by hand, but either method works.

Depending on what you're doing at any instant, the display area can show a menu, thumbnails of several photos, a slide show, or a single photo with additional command buttons. You can, for example, choose Edit Photo to crop, remove red-eye, or adjust brightness. Choosing Get Creative lets you add a frame, add clip art stored in the printer, draw on the image, or otherwise modify the photo.

Of course, no matter how impressive the touch-screen menus are, they wouldn't matter much if the output didn't look good. On my tests, the A826 turned in true photo quality in every case, whether printing from a CompactFlash card, a USB key, a Canon PowerShot S60 camera, or a computer. For some photos, I had to adjust the brightness to get acceptable quality, and in others the colors were too punchy—unrealistic green for grass, for example. Overall, however, the quality was as good as what you'd get from going to a local drugstore or photo shop, although not as good as you would expect from a professional-level photo lab or the very best photo printers.

The photos are reasonably rugged. Drops of water will leave water stains if you leave them to dry, but I held an entire photo under running water while rubbing it and then left it to dry, without any visible effect. Even better, I didn't see any surface scratches from sliding the photos over each other repeatedly while flipping through them. You can pass them around for people to look at without worrying about having them ruined. And they also resist fading. HP claims a lifetime of more than 200 years for photos kept in dark storage, as in an album; more than 50 years if kept behind glass, as in a frame; and more than 10 years if exposed to air.

As with the A826's output quality, the print speed is more than acceptable, but not impressive. I timed our standard 4-by-6 test photos from a computer at an average of 1 minute 27 seconds each. The full range of timings for printing from a computer, CompactFlash card, USB key, and Canon PowerShot S60 camera was 1:13 to 1:51. Times for 5-by-7 photos ranged from 1:35 to 2:00.

As a point of comparison, the slightly less expensive Sony Picture Station DPP-FP90, which is essentially tied for fastest dedicated photo printer on our tests, took from 43 to 56 seconds for a 4-by-6, averaging just 50 seconds for our standard test photos. Keep in mind, though, that the DPP-FP90 is limited to printing at 4-by-6 photos.

Cost per print is unchanged from last year's crop of HP dedicated photo printers, which means it's still higher than I'd like, but not unusually high. At $34.99 (direct) for packs with enough ink and paper for 120 photos, the price per 4-by-6 is 29.2 cents. (There's still no equivalent pack for 5-by-7s, and HP still doesn't quote a cost for that size.)

The combination of high initial price, cost per photo, and less-than-impressive speed and output quality keep the A826 from earning Editors' Choice status. Still, it comes close. Its speed, quality, and price per photo are all acceptable, and the large touch screen is highly seductive, all of which makes the A826 a more-than-reasonable choice for printing photos at home.

Check out the HP Photosmart A826 Home Photo Center's test scores.

Video
Watch the HP Photosmart A826 Home Photo Center Video Review!

More Photo Printer Reviews: