HP Photosmart 8250

I bought this printer primarily for producing hard copies of the photos from my Nikon D70 and because it was half price in the Christmas sales ;-)

I'd been in the market for a printer for a while. The 8250 is rated very highly for photographic printing and the HP range of printers seemed to be well supported under Linux so .. why not? The 8250 has won Best Buy and Recommended awards from Computer Shopper, PC Advisor and PC Pro - and you can believe those awards because this printer can produce some exceptional results.

A quick overview of the best bits:

• 6 individual ink cartridges
• Handles 6x4 paper from a dedicated tray
• Incorporates 4 media slots (CF, SD, Memorystick and .. err .. something else) which can be mounted
• Works well under Linux with good tools
• Quick
• Excellent photo print quality (text docs are less than ideal)

Using this printer under Linux is pretty straight forward, but it does require a wee bit of work to set everything up. Your first port of call should be the excellent HP Linux Printing Project homepage. This is what a Sourceforge project should look like.

For the 8250 you'll need to use the HPLIP package and follow the instructions here to get everything installed. I found the whole process very straight-forward and totally painless. I won't bore you be reproducing the documentation here, so take a look at the site and you'll find everything that you need. The only slight problem I encountered was that my SuSE install didn't know about the 8250, so I had to download the 8200 PPD from the excellent linuxprinting.org website and manually select it when I used YaST to set the printer up. When the installation is complete you'll be able to use the printer inside Linux and you'll end up with a bunch of useful diagnostic and calibration tools to boot. Well done HP!

On my PC, plugging a memory card into the printer causes the media to be mounted as a SCSI drive. So, not only can you print, you can also use the printer as a card reader which is a nice bonus. The card reader is automatically mounted on usb-storage-MY59E1X2H50459:0:0:0p1 - you can only mount one card at a time.

Update
I upgraded my desktop PC to SuSE 10 and the setup was slightly different ..

First of all, the HP Toolbox was installed by default and YaST now has a .ppd file for the 8200 series - so that makes life a little easier.

I started by using YaST to setup the printer, which was all very straightforward, and printed a test page to confirm that it was working correctly. Then I used the System Services part of YaST to enable hplip to start at boot time. Then, as root, I edited /etc/cups/cupsd.conf to allow me to administer CUPSD. You need to find the line "AuthType BasicDigest" (very nearly at the end of the file), comment it out and add another line like this ..

#AuthType BasicDigest
AuthType ShadowHash

.. which will allow you, as a normal user, to administer the printer via the CUPSD HTTP interface. Then, still as root ..

rchplip restart
rccups restart

.. then exit from root and return to your normal login. Then ..

hp-toolbox

.. and you'll be prompted to use the CUPSD HTTP interface to add the printer to CUPSD. It's all pretty straightforward, just follow the instructions and make sure that you when you're prompted to select the device URI that you use the "hp:/usb/Photosmart_8200_series?serial=XXXXXXXXXXX" option. Once the printer's configured you can print a test page to verify that everything's working and then use hp-toolbox in the normal way.