Please be aware, before buying this printer, that it uses traditional four-color (cyan, magenta, yellow, black (CMYK)) technology. While four-color printing is the standard for offset color printing (i.e.: the process used by commercial printing plants), this printer is not capable of producing the lifelike continuous tones of a six-or-more color printer designed for printing photographs. That doesn't mean it's bad for its intended use--the speedy printing of typical business documents on plain paper, or getting output that simulates the four-color offset printing process--but it does mean that shoppers looking for photographic-quality output should look for a different printer better suited to that objective.

On behalf of a family member who works as a commercial artist, I wanted a large-format printer to replace a pair of ancient Epsons that constantly clogged. I bought a new large-format Epson (Workforce 1100--see my review) thinking that 15 years of development since my... Read more

We were very excited to buy our first wide-format printers. I am a designer and photographer and my husband is an architect so we needed something to meet both our needs. The cost seemed amazing $[...] on sale from $[...] but the quality of the images that came out was far worse than our 10 year- old less than $[...]printer.

First off we did many tests- probably about $[...] worth of paper and ink. Tried it with all the special HP recommended papers tried several settings, printing from different programs, different papers. Everything looked grainy. The vectors and lines looked ok so long as they were not inverted (white lines with black background).

-If you just want to print AutoCad 13x19 drawings (black vectors)- then you should be fine.
-If you want low contrast color pictures and you don't care if the shaded areas are a bit grainy- then you should be fine.

Anything else for the HP officejet 7000 just falls short.

The printer has very good quality. I like the fact that the software integrates well with the hP solution center so you can go to one place to view things such as ink and cleaning of print heads (I also have an officejet Pro 8000). The only thing I had a problem with was I thought it would print borderless on all formats up to the maximum size (I think it was 13 x 19). I made a custom brochure using Adobe Indesign and built it at 8.5 x 14 to give me a little more area to work with but could not find the setting to print borderless at that size. It supported 8.5 x 11 and 11 x 17 borderless. It would have been nice to have all sizes borderless. Maybe HP could put out an updated driver that would allow for that. Otherwise, it is a good printer for the money.

Chuck