Sometimes it takes more than one try to get things right. Consider the HP Photosmart D7460 Printer ($179.99 direct). It's a direct descendant of last year's D7360, a photocentric printer with most of the same features. In particular, both can print from a PictBridge camera or computer but are most impressive as home photo kiosks. Plug in a memory card or USB key and you can preview photos, choose options, and give the print command through a touch screen. The problem with last year's model was its less-than-ideal photo quality.

This year's D7460 solves that problem. It keeps everything that was good about the D7360 and bumps up the photo quality—from merely good enough for snapshots to superb. It gets an increase in touch screen size to a spacious 3.5 inches. It also has some significant new features, most notably network support in the form of both an Ethernet connector and Wi-Fi. What's more, it does all that while selling for 10 percent lower than the D7360's original price.

Setup is standard for a photo printer that uses six ink colors—cyan, yellow, magenta, light cyan, light magenta, and black—with a separate cartridge for each color. Find a spot for the 6.8-by-18.2-by-15.25-inch (HWD) printer, plug it in, turn it on, install the six ink cartridges and paper, and you're ready to print from a camera, memory card, or USB key. If you also want to print from a computer, you need to run the automated installation program and connect a cable. I used a wired network connection for my tests, letting the setup program find the printer and install it for network printing.

The D7460's paper handling is a weak point for standard printing but a potential strong point for photos. The primary tray holds only 100 sheets of paper, and replenishing it can quickly become annoying you print more than about 20 sheets per day. On the other hand, there's also a second tray for 4-by-6-inch paper, so you can load both standard letter-size paper and 4-by 6-inch photo paper. Even better, if you use the printer for photos only, the two trays let you keep two different sizes of photo paper loaded and available.

Given the choice, I'd rather have two full-size trays along with a higher paper capacity in each tray, such as you can be found in some Canon printers, including the Canon Pixma iP4500 Photo Printer. At least the D7460 offers the convenience of switching between two types of paper simply by choosing the correct tray (or setting the printer to do so automatically).

The D7460's bias toward photos shows up in its performance as well as in its paper handling, with better speed relative to other ink jets on our photo test suite than on the business suite. For photos, the D7460 averaged 1 minute 9 seconds for each 4-by-6 and 2:48 for each 8-by-10 (using QualityLogic's hardware and software for timing, www.qualitylogic.com).

As a point of reference, the iP4500, which is one of the fastest all-purpose ink jet printers I've tested, was only a little faster for 4-by-6s, at 52 seconds, although its speed advantage for 8-by-10s was more significant, at 1:44. The difference for business applications was also significant, with the D7460 taking a total of 16:15 compared with 12:12 for the iP4500.

The photocentric bias is particularly evident when it comes to quality. Photo quality is closer to what you'd expect from a professional photo lab or a much more expensive printer as opposed to your local drugstore. In fact, I saw only one problem on our tests worth mentioning: A monochrome photo showed a slight but obvious color-balance problem, with different color tints at different shades of gray. If you don't print photos in black and white, however, this obviously won't be an issue.

HP also promises a long life for photos, with a claimed 200 years in dark storage, 40 years behind glass, and a minimum 30 years exposed to the air (with testing still in progress at this writing). They're also durable enough—both water- and scratch-resistant—so you can hand unprotected photos to people to admire without worrying they'll come back ruined. I saw no visible scratches after repeated shuffling though the photos.

Text quality is a little below par for an ink jet. More than half of our test fonts were easily readable, with well-formed characters, at 5 points, one highly stylized font with thick strokes needed 20 points, and another couldn't pass the threshold even at 20 points. I consider the text acceptable for schoolwork or most business uses, but not for documents with small fonts or for printouts such as résumés, where you want crisp, clean characters that convey a sense of professionalism.

Graphics quality is a match for most ink jets—easily satisfactory for any internal business need, but not for documents I'd want to hand out to an important client or customer.

As may be obvious, the HP Photosmart D7460 Printer is not a good choice if you want an all-purpose printer for, say, a home office, or a personal printer in a larger office. If you're looking primarily to print photos and only an occasional text or graphics document, however, its photo quality should earn it a place on your short list. And if you want a printer strictly for photos, to use without even having to connect to a computer, the D7460 may well be your home-kiosk photo printer of choice.

Check out the HP Photosmart D7460 Printer's test scores.

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