It handles a variety of paper types, but you’ll have to play musical media trays.

Things that go bump in the night: ghosts, ghouls, and the new HP Photosmart Pro B8850. If this printer sits idle for more than a day, it powers on, wakes up, and checks each of its 4,884 ink nozzles to make sure they’re unclogged so it can be ready to go when you are. Then it powers down and goes back to sleep.

Unlike most of its competitors that use gobs of ink to clear just a few clogged nozzles, the B8850 detects exactly which nozzles need clearing and uses only a miniscule amount of ink to do it. The printer even assigns spare nozzles as stand-ins if some become clogged during printing, so your image won’t be ruined. Very smart.

Setup went without a hitch, including a calibration routine that fine-tunes the printer’s color accuracy. Pigment-based HP Vivera ink cartridges are supplied for eight inkwells: Photo Black, Light Gray, Matte Black, Cyan, Magenta, Yellow, Light Magenta, and Light Cyan. When coupled with HP papers, their fade-resistance is impressive: up to 200 years according to the manufacturer. Although replacement cartridges are costly ($34), they hold almost twice as much ink (27ml) as those for competing printers, saving you both time and money.

Output was superb—as good or better than professional lab-made prints. Using the B8850’s Best setting (2400 x 1200 dpi) we printed over two hundred 13-by-19-inch photos without a paper jam and, for an encore, rolled out several 13-by-39-inch panoramas (maximum paper length is 44 inches). We also output more than 50 black-and-white photos with rich blacks and a beautiful range of gray midtones—the Grayscale option allows printing with black and gray inks only or with a composite of blacks and subtle colors.

The HP driver’s paper settings were sometimes confusing. For example, is Advanced Photo Paper glossy, luster, matte, or something else? (It’s glossy.) Third-party papers such as premium Hahnemühle and modestly priced Red River yielded excellent prints using either the B8850’s driver or with Photoshop in command. If you want to use ICC paper profiles for precise color control, there are more than 60 available for different paper brands at HP’s website (www.hp.com), along with screenshots and detailed instructions on how to use them.

Light- and medium-weight papers are loaded face down into a front main tray, drawn into the printer, curved 180 degrees, printed, and then rolled out onto a heavy output tray directly above it. The output tray partially blocks access to the main tray, making loading large single sheets difficult. HP suggests removing and replacing the output tray each time, but that became a hassle; we eventually replaced it with an easier-to-use piece of foam core.

Media heavier than 220gsm (grams per square meter), such as some watercolor, canvas, and photo rag papers, feed straight through a specialty media tray that swings out from the front of the printer. But enough space is needed behind the printer to allow for nearly the full length of the paper, as it’s first pulled in and then fed back out onto the same tray. We had to move the printer almost 2 feet from the wall when making 13-by-19-inch prints. If you regularly use long, heavy papers, you’ll need a 3-foot-deep clearance or you’ll have to turn the printer sideways.