Differences Between Photosmart Printers and Officejet

by Steve Lander Google

Photosmart and OfficeJet printers serve completely different purposes and choosing the wrong one can cost you money, hurt the quality of your printouts or leave you with a broken printer. Both are inkjet printers made by Hewlett-Packard and both share a number of features, but they are designed for different applications. Photosmart printers provide excellent photo printing capabilities, while Officejets are optimized for general, small business printing tasks.


HP Officejet printers are designed to provide high quality output roughly similar to that of a laser printer. In their highest quality setting, the highest quality Officejets print color images at a resolution of 4800 by 1200 dots per inch. Others achieve a 600-by-600 resolution. Photosmart printers, on the other hand, print at resolutions as high as 9600-by-2400 dpi. This higher resolution allows them to more accurately print different hues of color.

Duty Cycles

Photosmart printers are designed for relatively light use. A printer like the 7250 all-in-one is designed to print up to 1,250 pages per month. Officejets are designed to handle much more printing, befitting their design for use in a business setting. The Officejet 6700 all-in-one is rated for 12,000 pages per month, while the Officejet Pro 8000 printer can handle 15,000 pages per month.

Ink Sets

HP Photosmart and some Officejet printers use dye-based inks. Dye-based inks, which use a liquid colorant, produce very vivid colors but can be prone to fading over time. The pigment-based inks used in some Officejets suspend microscopic solid particles of color pigment in liquid and offer much better durability as well as the potential to last longer. Printers in both series offer at least four different colors -- cyan, magenta, yellow and black -- but some Photosmarts offer additional cartridges to increase their ability to reproduce photographic colors.


Both series of printers generally offer similar connectivity options. USB ports are standard for direct connection to a computer as are Ethernet ports that allow you to connect the printer to a network hub or switch for sharing among multiple computers. Some printers in both families also support wireless networking connections. Photosmart printers are also sometimes equipped with memory card readers and PictBridge USB connections that allow you to print photos directly from a camera or card without an intervening computer.

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