Digital Trends

HP Photosmart 145 April 13th, 2004 | by Rob Curtis

A Few Areas Of Concern

Several design and layout issues on the Photosmart 145 were areas of concern with us. Those of you familiar with the built in LCD displays in many of today's printers may be disappointed in the display on the HP 145. The LCD display is monochrome instead of color and you can't actually see the photos displayed — it is textual only.

You'll need to print an index card of your photos in order to reference them through the display. This is definitely a drawback in this unit and a big annoyance if you have a lot of pictures to print.

Another issue with the LCD is that there are no editing features other than the ability to change the layout of the picture. To edit our photos we had to use either the editing tools that came on the HP CD or a third party graphics program. This usually isn't an issue but in this case it really defeats the purpose of having a mobile printer. In fact, this really takes away from HP's statement that this printer offers “easy printing on the go” without the need of a computer.

As more printers offer on-board digital media card readers and those digital cards have greater capacity, the USB 1.1 specification is going to really slow things down. This unit is USB 1.1 as most printers are these days.

Someone at some printer manufacturer decided several years ago that they would no longer provide a print cable with their retail packages and most other companies followed suit. The HP 145 suffers from that issue also, so if you don't have a USB cable, you'll need to purchase one before you can use this product.

Our final issue with this printer concerns the print cartridge it uses. The Photosmart 145 is designed to use only one cartridge at a time, so if you wish to convert to black and white printing you'll need to swap the cartridge. We understand that this unit is geared towards photo printing and as the paper type is limited to 4x6 paper, printing text would be somewhat ridiculous, but for those that utilize black and white photos or want to print index cards or flash cards as example for notes or recipes, this could become a hassle.