Review: HP Photosmart Pro B9180

Ben Long

If you’ve been looking to buy a high-quality photo printer capable of producing archival-grade prints, then there’s a bit of a good news/bad news situation. The bad news is that the market is not as simple as it was a couple of years ago when only Epson produced such a thing as an affordable archival printer. The good news: the competitors who have taken on Epson are doing an exceptional job. The HP Photosmart Pro B9180 (Figure 1) is a first-rate desktop photo printer that outputs images up to 13″ x 19″ with print longevity of more than 200 years on some papers. It offers a full assortment of connectivity options and yields excellent output in either color or black and white. Here’s the real jaw-dropper: Shop around and you can find this printer for as low as $510.

Figure 1. The HP Photosmart Pro B9180.
The B9180 goes head-to-head against Epson’s more expensive, well-established StylusColor R2400 (see my review) and its K3 archival ink system. You’ll be hard-pressed to spot any differences in image quality between the two printers.
Whether the HP B9180 is right for you depends largely on the features that you’re looking for and the way that you like to work.
Set-up
Obviously, you’ll have to connect the HP B9180 to a power source and a computer. You can use a USB-2 cable or the built-in Ethernet cable to plug directly into your network for sharing. In my testing, Mac OS X’s Bonjour networking had no trouble finding the networked printer.
After inserting the print heads and ink cartridges and handing the printer a couple of pieces of paper, you have to let it sit for roughly half an hour as it does a bunch of preparation. When it’s finished, you’re ready to go.
Eight inks are used in the HP B9180: cyan, magenta, yellow, black, light cyan, light magenta, light gray, and two blacks, one photo and one matte.
The HP B9180 front panel provides a handy, always-on, accurate readout of remaining ink levels, making it simple to keep tabs on your current supply. It’s important to note, though, that you don’t want to turn the printer off. It’s designed to be left on all the time so that it can periodically clean out its ink supply lines and keep things ready to go. If you turn the printer off, you’ll have to wait through another lengthy prep cycle.
While it’s simple enough to leave the printer on, if a printer jam requires a reboot (a very rare, but possible phenomenon) you’ll have to wait for the prep cycle to finish before you can start printing again.
Paper Handling
Attractive, with a boxy design, the HP B9180 weighs a hefty 40 pounds or so.
All paper is fed into the front of the printer, either from the included paper tray, or from the special media feed that sits on the top of the tray. The tray sticks out a little bit from the front of the printer, which gives the HP B9180 a slightly larger profile than comparable printers that can fold completely shut.
As you might guess from a 40-pound desktop printer, the HP B9180 is solid. The paper tray is made of honest-to-goodness metal — a substance you don’t see on the outside of a lot of printers these days — and the overall build quality of the unit is first rate. There’s no creaking or flexing, and all of the joints and seams are tightly fitted. The HP B9180 feels much more substantial than its much more expensive competitors.
The printer’s paper tray can hold around 100 sheets of photo paper, or up to 200 sheets of regular paper. If you want to feed thicker paper, you’ll have to use the front-loading specialty feed tray, which allows media up to 1.5 mm thick. However, to use the specialty tray you have to feed the paper all the way through and out the back of the printer. The HP B9180 then pulls the paper back in for printing. If you’re feeding stiff, large sheets, you might need some extra space behind the printer. This is one of the only inconveniences of the printer’s design.
The HP B9180 can handle media from 3″ x 5″ up to 13″ x 19″ and can go borderless at any size and paper type. The paper tray is easy to handle and load, but you do have to remove the lid to fill it with paper. It would be nice to leave letter-sized paper in the printer and use the specialty tray when you want a large print. However, if you have the printer up against a wall, this isn’t practical because of the space required behind the printer, so you might find yourself using the tray most of the time. Fortunately, the printer is so well built that removing the cover and loading the tray is a very smooth process.
Closed-loop Calibration
Like some of HP’s other photo printers, the HP B9180 employs a closed-loop calibration system to ensure that the printer performs up to factory spec. When you first power up the 9180 it calibrates itself by printing out a test pattern, then sucking the page back into the printer for analysis. The printer performs measurements of the density of each patch and adjusts itself to its factory settings. This way, the printer delivers the correct amount of ink when printing.
The addition of closed-loop calibration is a great asset that ensures better software/hardware integration and more predictable image quality.
Software
When HP set out to design the B9180, the company made a concerted effort to engineer a product that photographers would want to use. To that end, they have built a very nice driver for the HP B9180. The basic print driver provides easy, consolidated access to the controls that you most frequently use when printing images. Paper type, quality, color handling, and paper feed are all accessible through a single pane within the driver.
However, you may find that some settings don’t stick from session to session when printing, so carefully check your print configuration each time you print.
HP has gone one step further than simply crafting a good printer driver. Realizing that most photographers will be printing out of Adobe Photoshop, which has a cumbersome print architecture, HP includes a special automated plug-in with a single dialog box containing all of the print configuration settings you need. So, rather than having to go through the usual three or four Photoshop/OS dialog boxes to make a print, you get all of the controls you need in one place. This is a really great idea, and more printer vendors should follow suit. Unfortunately, the plug-in still needs a little work. It took me two or three installations before I could get it to launch, and then I found a few flaky behaviors. Custom paper sizes didn’t work properly, and some setting didn’t stick. Nevertheless, this is a good start to a very good idea.
A special HP Printer Utility serves as a central control panel for managing all printer configuration and maintenance. In addition to cleaning and gauges for remaining ink, the utility also lets you activate the closed-loop calibration system and add custom paper types and profiles to the HP B9180 driver.
Performance
The HP B9180 is a good performer, offering speeds comparable to the other printers in its class. A 4″ x 6″ print takes about a minute and a half in best mode, while an 8″ x 10″ came out in a little over 3 minutes, and a 13″ x 19″ in around 7 minutes. I couldn’t tell any difference in image quality between best mode and normal mode, so I turn off best mode to conserve ink.
The printer is very frugal with ink, and its meters seem accurate. Unlike the Epson R2400, its chief rival, the HP B9180 doesn’t require cartridge swapping when you change from photo to matte paper. In fact, you don’t have to think about ink configuration at all when changing papers. Simply tell the printer driver what type of paper you’re printing on, and it automatically selects the appropriate ink.
In almost three months of use, I haven’t had a single head clog or ink issue. Occasionally the printer murmurs to itself and does something, and whatever it does seems to greatly improve the unit’s head life and ink efficiency. Going for weeks without printing won’t leave you suffering through clogged heads and lengthy cleaning cycles.
The print heads themselves are replaceable, but you may never need to do it.
Output Quality
The HP B9180 uses HP’s new Vivera inkset, a pigment ink system that offers excellent archivability on many different types of paper. The printer’s image quality is exceptional, with an extremely bright, wide color gamut and very dark blacks. Its ability to reproduce fine detail is superb on both matte and glossy papers, and it’s tough to spot printer dots or dithering patterns on any kind of media.
HP has released an excellent collection of media, ranging from several glossy and semi-gloss papers to very nice matte and fine art papers. The company licensed several high-quality papers from Hannemuhl, all of which are very reasonably priced.
Most impressively, HP has clearly spent a lot of time crafting profiles for all of their supported papers. Whether you choose to print using application-managed color and one of the included ICC profiles, or leave printing up to the driver, you’ll get excellent results on all of HP’s papers.
I also did some testing on Epson papers and Museo silver rag, using custom profiles that I made myself. The HP B9180 delivered great results on any media I ran through it.
For users who want to output black and white prints, the HP B9180 delivers truly neutral prints with beautiful blacks. There was no visible metameric shift and the dark blacks made for rich, detailed output.
The Last Word
HP has long ruled the office printer market, but the HP B9180 should go a long way to establish the company as a first-rate option for photographers. With the B9180, HP has built an incredibly full-featured photo printer that delivers output that’s as good as its competitor, with better longevity, and all for a price that is much lower than anything else on the market.