HP A826

The basics

The HP A826 is a home printer with seven-inch touchscreen, USB and memory card slots, a stylus for editing, writing or drawing on your images and 100-sheet internal tray. The photo print time is as quick as 39 seconds!

The good

Don’t even bother looking at the manual, this is the easiest photo printer ever made. If you can’t follow the simple touchscreen instructions to turn digital snaps into punchy little 7x5-inch prints, you probably haven’t got any fingers. In which case, grab the stylus in your teeth and get stuck in – there’s red-eye reduction, basic graphics and frames, plus captioning with an on-screen keyboard. It doubles as a digital photo frame when you’re not printing and you can add a Bluetooth adaptor for cameraphone printing for a reasonable £25.

The bad

As you might expect, prints are a little more expensive than you’ll pay at Boots – but not much. Shop around for HP’s value pack of 6x4-inch paper and ink and you can get the price down to about 25p a print. Unlike most of HP’s postcard printers, you can’t add a battery for truly portable printing.

The bottom line

Your mum will love it, your kids will love it, even some smart household pets will find it meets their photo printing needs. The best postcard printer around.