Unless you're the type of person to use your multifunction printer as a stand-alone unit, without tethering it to a computer, you won't find much use for the touchscreen interface, even though it's intuitive and very well designed.

Additional documentation and troubleshooting/FAQs are available from the website. It comes with a standard one-year warranty. The C309g is Windows 7 ready, according to HP, with updated drivers available from the company's website.

The black cartridge in standard and high yield capacities retail for AU$19 and AU$54 respectively at the time of writing, so expect to pay 7.6 cents per page for standard. So a standard plain black cartridge will yield 250 pages, the photo black will yield 130 10x15cm prints, and the colour cartridges will yield 300 pages. The tricky part of working out a cost per page metric is that each cartridge has a different yield for different purposes. Colour accuracy, a strong point of previous printers like the Photosmart C309a Premium Fax, was fairly off, and they just looked dull compared to lab quality prints (and even prints from a recently tested single-function printer, the Epson Photo Stylus T50).ĭespite the lacklustre print quality it only took 42 seconds for a colour 10x15cm print to emerge, which is quite quick for its class and pretty much exactly the same as the C309a's time.Īs mentioned, the C309g uses five ink tanks that are available in standard and high yield capacities. Then we shifted to larger A4-sized HP branded photo paper to see if it was just a once-off issue with the provided paper, but it wasn't. Initial test prints on the included paper weren't great, with very large print droplets visible, weak colours and poor printing of blacks and darker tones. The same quality that the C309g exhibited on text wasn't the case with photos, which was disappointing considering previous HP multifunction devices we have tested excelled at photo prints. On average, the C309g was capable of printing 10 pages per minute on standard quality.

The C309g took a little while to warm up, printing its first page within 27 seconds of being sent the document from Microsoft Word, but was incredibly fast with each successive page. Plain text quality was excellent, with clear and crisp lettering from small font sizes through to large ones, serif and sans-serif fonts. It's an interesting idea to be able to print photos that you may have uploaded while on the road and the process to connect and print from the service is painless and intuitive. Via the touchscreen, the printer can connect to HP's online photo sharing and printing service, Snapfish. The resolution isn't as pleasing as the implementation on Lexmark's offering (the Pro805), but the HP's does offer the added bonus of having a touch border which has options illuminated around the edge of the screen (such as home, back and a help setting). On the device itself, the touchscreen is the main way you interact with the printer. Once everything has been installed, the HP Solution Centre is the central repository for printing needs on your computer, covering common options like scanning and printing photos. Make yourself a cup of tea or five while you're doing this. The C309g also takes an aeon to align and install cartridges when you first put them in the device. As with most printer set-ups, installing software and drivers for the C309g will take a fair chunk out of your day.

Hp photosmart premium printer