The Bottom Line: The "amount paid" is not an indicator of cost. Cartridges are $70-. a change of cartridges 1x month makes the printer cost $1000- in one year.

I am looking at this product as a Premium Plus photo paper, high quality output machine only. And I have had this machine for a month, only having replaced a bunch of the cartridges already.

-Hassle free?
Yes: Easy to use papers make prints just the click of a button. Great feature for faster mass outputs.
And No: Low ink yields make for frequent cartridge changes, printer refuses to print when nearing cartridge change.

-Fast?
Fast enough for me. Compared to the 8 previous printers this one is a real rocket.

-Budget?
No. Oh hmm. $70- for a set of cartridges is kinda expensive. The cartridges have very little ink in them, 3,5-6,0 ml for the colored inks (expensive drops there, HP!) makes it comparable to pharmaceutical pricing. Inks cant be that expensive...? I see that a generic ink cartridge maker has 8-12 ml of ink in the color cartridges. But can one trust the color then?

-Gimmicks?
Well, pretty good here. Very few distractions.
The annoying pop up windows can be shut off, sort of. Just because the ink is low doesnt mean one wants to be clicking ones way past HP messages to make a print.
HP DIGITAL MONITOR program is really annoying. I wish we could live without it. Please, good printers dont need this sort of stuff to slow down and confuse computer operations. (Installing the HP program was the last thing I did before recently reformatting my hard drive) Need advice on how uninstall the digital monitor.

-Looks?
Great looking machine. Really great. I love the way it looks. So cool. Like sleek a blue-eyed robot monster with lips. Hmm.

And the prints look great. On premium paper they are very solid.

In general:

I have been looking for a no-gimmicks straightforward good practical color printer. One that just prints good color photos at a good price without hassles. This printer is not quite it, I am sad to say, Ink price being the only issue.

I dont care for all the extra buttons add ons, I really just want good prints out of the computer. (Many people definitely would like the straight-from-camera printing.) The printer does that great. The prints look almost as nice as the design of the machine.

They are not earth shattering but generally very good, color is sharp and not oversaturated as in some printers, although a little pixelated (screened). If you are far sighted you wont notice it without a magnifying glass. Shades of black are good. Red is not saturated enough and the green could be a bit less bright. And the prints are supposed to last a long time. Nice.

The printer is quiet and fast enough for my medium studio outputs.

However, I bought this printer, oblivious of the high cost of the low volume inks. $70- for a set of ink cartridges is just way out of line, given that that's half the price of the printer. And almost the price of a case of red wine!! Cheers to the bottom, HP executives and CEOs, drink up! This machine is designed to keep you busy buying ink cartridges and paper from HP. Fine enough, however, the cartridges should have a lot of ink in them for that price.

So waking up here, very little ink in cartridges means that I now printed about 20 sheets 6x8 photos and it wants a new cartridge after that run. Refuses to print even though there was no indication of ink reduction on the last print.

The ink situation is really the only big issue I have with this printer. It is hard to swallow because if HP just doubled the ink amount in the cartridges, It would be priced OK and even I would highly recommend this machine.

(I only recommend things that work well for my work)

Please correct me if I am calculating something wrong here, but ten rounds of cartridges makes $700 dollars, pay attention; bringing the cost to a thousand dollars after one year, if you change cartridges once a month. Now, a thousand dollars is not the $150 you thought at the outset? You can afford that? Ok, then this is a great machine. Easy to use and all.

I'll update this when I have had the printer for a longer time. So far the HP ink situation is seriously limiting my potential output use for the printer, so I may look for another one.

I'll keep you posted ;-)

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[u]Update Oct 6, 2006: [/u]
Granted this printer does pretty good work for high level photo output. However, the inks are very annoying:
-They dont last that long and at TEN-FIFTEEN DOLLARS for a few drops of ink is an anti-consumer stand. Ink is dirt cheap in reality, they are selling you the packaging and distribution of minimal amounts of ink at very expensive rates.
-When there is obviously some ink left, judging by the last output, the printer refuses to print and defaults to black print only. This is disastrous for art deadlines and in time crunches.
-Also the HP Digital Imaging Monitor is truly retarded.