Hp Sprocket Photo Printer 2 in 1

Get Dieter and Helmut out of your caput: You lot’re thinking of
the wrong Sprockets(Opens in a new window)
. The HP Sprocket 2nd Edition ($129.99), a pocket-size
portable snapshot printer, is the company’s 3rd by that name, replacing
the popular original Sprocket
reviewed in Dec 2016. Since then, we’ve tested similar models from Canon, Kodak, and Lifeprint, but we didn’t find one worthy of our Editors’ Choice nod until the HP Sprocket Plus came forth in mid-2018. The Sprocket second Edition’southward beefed-up feature list, funky augmented-reality angle, and impressive output-quality overhaul stand for big steps forwards for this fun device. Our new Editors’ Choice, the HP Sprocket second Edition ends its sibling’s short reign as PCMag’s height portable photograph printer.

A Quirky, Spiffy Printer

The Sprocket 2nd Edition is about the footprint of a smartphone, but chunkier. Because the
HP Sprocket Plus
($149.99 at HP)(Opens in a new window)

prints slightly larger photos than the original Sprocket and the Sprocket 2nd Edition (the pics are 2.3 past 3.4 inches, versus the more common ii by three inches), the Sprocket Plus is slightly wider than the other two.
The Sprocket 2d Edition measures 1 by 4.six by 3.2 inches (HWD) and weighs about four ounces. That’s in line with the original Sprocket, as well every bit the competing Canon IVY Mini, the
Kodak Mini 2 Hd, and Lifeprint’s Hyperphoto Printers.

While the original Sprocket comes in a practical black with silver trim, or in all-white, the Sprocket 2nd Edition comes in…well, not really
colors, but moods, or states of mind. You have your selection of three hues: Noir, Luna Peral, and Blush.

These sound more than like lipsticks or perfumes. In improver to the caput-scratcher names, each color has a clarification. Example:

Luna Peral.
Shadows on white as time passes. Fragile balance of energy and repose.

We
are
talking about a machine hither, right? Right. According to HP, its marketplace inquiry says that the chief users of portable photo printers similar these are young women anile 16 to 24, and it says it geared these new colors to that demographic. Across these, HP says that versions of the Sprocket 2nd Edition in more colors, including Lilac, volition be bachelor from specific retailers. (Info on exactly what colors and where wasn’t available yet, at this writing.)

As you

tin can see in the image above, each of the unlike-colored tops has a pattern of dots or flecks. The patterns break upward the monotony of these otherwise solid-colour printers, but they have another, more interesting role:
When yous scan them with your smartphone photographic camera from inside HP’due south Sprocket App (which I’ll hash out more in a moment), status data shows up on the screen, a limited implementation of augmented reality. HP calls this Reveal.

Around the Edges and Inside

Like well-nigh other pocket photograph printers, the Sprocket second Edition’southward pattern is basic. Y’all’ll see a print-output slot and a small status light just above it on the front border, and a ability button, a micro USB port for charging, a reset pinhole, and a battery-status LED on the rear border…

HP Sprocket ii insta 5

HP Sprocket 2 insta viii

HP says that you lot’ll get 35 to 40 prints from each battery charge. Everything else—configuring the printer, pairing information technology via Bluetooth, photo editing and enhancing, and much more—is handled from the Sprocket App on your Apple tree or Android mobile device.

Most contempo pocket photo printers, including all three Sprockets, the
Catechism IVY Mini
($149.99 at HP)(Opens in a new window)

, and the Lifeprint models I mentioned, brand utilise of a technology known every bit Zip Ink, or ZINK. ZINK printers all apply color thermal newspaper fabricated past a company of the same name. Instead of spraying on or fusing external ink or toner practical by the printer, ZINK newspaper releases colors via chemicals embedded in the newspaper; the colors come up to the surface based on heat patterns practical to the paper past the printer. ZINK does, nevertheless, produce branded paper that HP says has been tweaked specifically for the Sprocket printers. It as well offers paper packs specific to competing models.

The Sprocket 2nd Edition receives newspaper simply as the others do. You simply remove the hat, drop in the paper print side up, and make sure that the bluish barcoded card in the newspaper parcel goes in commencement, face down…

HP Sprocket 2 insta ten

The printer scans the barcode to calibrate the printer to each new paper pack’southward slightly dissimilar heat-awarding requirements.

HP Sprocket 2 insta 9

New App, New Features

Little photograph printers like the Sprocket second Edition have minimal processing prowess onboard. Most of what they do is initiated and tightly controlled by software installed on your smartphone or tablet.

In this example, that’south HP’s Sprocket App, which is downloadable from the Apple Store or the Google Play Store. The first time yous launch information technology, the plan finds your Sprocket printer, pairs with it (without you having to meddle in your phone’due south Bluetooth setup panel), and walks you lot through the rest of the installation. Y’all can now print the photos yous shoot with your mobile device’due south camera, or images stored on your smartphone or tablet. You lot can also connect to and impress from Facebook, Google, or Instagram social-media and cloud sites.

As with nigh other apps for pocket photo printers similar this 1, the Sprocket App lets you make bones paradigm corrections, tweaking items such equally crops, brightness, and dissimilarity/colour levels. Y’all tin can likewise add borders, text, or stickers, and even draw (or paint) shapes freehand. You’ll also employ the Sprocket App, of form, to configure the printer itself, and to work with well-nigh of the features nosotros’re about to discuss.

Here’s a rundown of the most important and the new stuff in the Sprocket App.

Augmented Reality Photos

This debuted on the Sprocket Plus (information technology was called Scan Manner there) and is like to Lifeprint’s augmented reality (“Hyperphoto”) feature. You associate printed photos with curt video clips and then invite friends and family to scan the printed image with their smartphone’southward camera inside the Sprocket App. Doing so plays the clip on their telephone.

The chief divergence between HP’s and Lifeprint’southward iterations is that Lifeprint stores the associated video on the company’s Instagram-inspired photo repository, which makes information technology available to anybody with a copy of the photo. HP requires the user to have both components—the photo
and
the video—stored on the mobile device scanning the photo. Is it handy? Questionable. Gimmicky? Sure. But it’s a fun gee-whiz feature to print friends and family.

Tiling

Also possible on the Sprocket Plus, this is the process of printing pieces of a larger hard-re-create image or graphic, and and so sticking the pieces, or tiles, together to create a larger copy of the original shot. You define up to nine tiles in Sprocket App, print them, and then piece the epitome back together using printed guides and adhesive on the back of the paper. Canon’s IVY Mini also supports tiling.

Enhanced Connectivity and Multi-User Printing

In response to customer feedback, HP has improved the Sprocket 2nd Edition’s
Bluetooth LE (Low Energy)(Opens in a new window)

connectivity to eliminate flaky pairing and dropped connections. The beefed-up Bluetooth service now besides supports multiple simultaneous connections, allowing you and your friends and family to utilise the printer at the same time.

Multi-users, in this case, means
three. The Sprocket second Edition will accept impress jobs from upward to that many users simultaneously. Anybody within the Bluetooth LE connexion range (near fifteen to 20 anxiety) with the Sprocket App installed on his or her mobile device can connect to and print photos on your printer. While you can’t control who connects and prints, yous
can
manage your print jobs, which are listed by filenames and sorted by impress times in the Sprocket App’southward Print Queue. And yous tin prioritize jobs by moving them up or down in the list. Yous can too suspension, delete, and motility print jobs from the queue to an inactive pane on the Impress Queue screen.

Unfortunately, I couldn’t notice a way to identify print jobs by user, just you can tell from the printer itself when
your
own certificate(southward) are printing: The LED in a higher place the output slot flashes in the color assigned to your printer in the Sprocket App…

I asked HP why Sprocket 2nd Edition’south security was so…non
lax, simply nonexistent. The company rep said that since Bluetooth LE requires users to exist and then close to the printer to connect, you’ll likely see anybody using it.

Always On and Always Continued

Instead of going to sleep and disconnecting from your tablet or smartphone, the Sprocket 2nd Edition at present stays connected when sleeping and wakes when y’all send it a print job. This eliminates the need to reboot the printer to reactivate it and reconnect to your mobile device.

I should annotation here, though, that this didn’t work for me. I left my printer idle too long, not realizing that I had to physically turn Sleep mode off. This also seems like a proficient place to point out the copy of the documentation I worked from was non fully developed, so this may be rectified by the time you read this.

Printer Status Communication

The 2 status lights on the Sprocket second Edition illustrate low and high battery-charge levels, too as when a impress job is running, and when a firmware update is happening. The Reveal function, which I alluded to earlier, is another augmented-reality characteristic. It displays the printer’s status (for example, the battery-level info) when you browse the dot patterns on the Sprocket second Edition’s lid with the Sprocket App. This didn’t work for me the showtime few times I tried, only I was up against this review’s borderline and ran out of time to experiment with it.

Name Your Sprocket, and Upcoming Stuff

During its initial installation and printer set routine, you lot are prompted to alter your Sprocket’southward proper name from the default “HP Sprocket 200.” If you ignored the prompt or, thinking that the device’southward name is unimportant, typed in something inappropriate, you tin modify the name and any other setting from one of the iii settings control panels (Sprocket, Inbox, and Print Queue) accessible from the app’s main menu. (Information technology is located in the summit left corner of the Home screen.) After giving this some thought, though, I couldn’t figure out how, across purposes of vanity, giving this printer a unique name would be helpful, unless I found myself in a room full of Sprockets dissemination the same proper name. Not probable; but it’south an option.

HP says y’all tin look for another characteristic to come to the app soon: Afterwards this year, expect support for shared photo albums for specific events. Through these, owners of the albums can gear up shared events and contribute images to that event.

Zis Is Ze Part of Sprockets in Vich Ve Print

I used my yr-former
Samsung Galaxy
smartphone and my daughter’southward
Apple tree iPhone 8
to print some sample pictures.
The second Edition model printed the 2-by-3-inch photos I threw at it at an average of 39 seconds each, almost 3 seconds faster than the first Sprocket and 19 seconds quicker than the Sprocket Plus.

Remember, though, that the Sprocket Plus photos contain thirty pct more than coverage area than the 2×3 models’. The Sprocket 2nd Edition was also a substantial 51 seconds quicker than the
Lifeprint 3×4.5 Hyperphoto
(it prints snapshots that are 50 percent larger) simply nine seconds slower than
Lifeprint 2×3 Hyperphoto, the fastest standard-size ZINK model so far.

Compared to some of the other 2-by-three-inch models, the Sprocket 2nd Edition proved 5 seconds faster than the Canon IVY and 41 seconds quicker than the Kodak Mini 2. (The latter is a thermal-dye-sublimation machine that uses cartridges containing both ink and the photograph newspaper, not ZINK technology.)

See How We Test Printers

Mediocre print quality—a lack of colour vibrance and image detail—was one of the more frequent complaints HP received from the owners of the original Sprocket. Merely this is not exclusive to HP ZINK-based products. A recurring theme in user reviews, professional reviews, and just almost everywhere else has been the overall so-so photos produced by these little ZINK printers. The Sprocket product manager told me that in response, afterward many hours of research and collaboration with ZINK, HP’s in-house imaging specialists, product developers, and programmers found a solution.

With some pocket-sized tweaking of the HP-branded ZINK paper and an overhaul of the printer’s firmware and the thermal printheads, the Sprocket 2nd Edition applies heat to the thermal newspaper with much more precision than previous models could. (An HP rep as well told me that a solution entailing an overhaul of ZINK’s thermal paper, too, was not pursued, since then many of these portable photo printers use the same media.) The results are shown in the HP-generated comparison below. (Note: I’ve seen this firsthand and was duly impressed.) The prints are brighter, with more than vibrant colors and greater detail…

That said, even with the output improvements, the new Sprocket’s images are not as vivid and sharp (which y’all probably can’t see on a low-resolution web page) as photos produced by v- and half dozen-ink photo printers and all-in-ones from Canon and Epson. I still contend, as I take in other ZINK snapshot printer reviews, that some other reason for the somewhat bland output is the lack of black in the ZINK color model. In any example, in that location’due south no denying the comeback. For now, anyway, the Sprocket 2d Edition produces the best-looking two-past-3-inch ZINK-based snapshots from a pocket photo printer.

A Look at the Print Costs

The Sprocket 2nd Edition’s running costs are, due to a better deal on HP-branded ZINK paper, lower than the first Sprocket’southward initial 65-cent cost per photo. However, because these two products use the same media, a price reduction for the new Sprocket’south newspaper too reduces the cost for the other ane.

HP Sprocket two insta 3

The paper comes in packs of 20 sheets for $ix.99, 50 sheets for $24.99, and 100 sheets for $44.99. If you choose the 100-sheet pack, your cost per photo volition exist 45 cents; otherwise, it’south 50 cents a print with the other two.

Xl-five cents is adept, but not as good as it gets. The Lifeprint 2×3’southward 110-packs cost less than xx cents each, for instance, but the 3×4.5 model’s prints will price you a jaw-dropping $1.10 each, considerably more than the Sprocket Plus’ 65 cents per. The Canon IVY’s newspaper is 50 cents per sheet, and the Kodak Mini’southward dye-sub photos run about 70 cents each. So it would seem that the Sprocket second Edition’s paper lands right in the centre of the, ahem, “pack.”

HP Sprocket 2 insta one

The New Sprocket: Remade, Non Refreshed

It’s a common practice in the printer manufacture to add together a (sometimes minor) feature or two to an existing production, tick upwardly the product name and/or number, and so transport it as a major version update or all-new product. HP seldom does that. Case in point is the Sprocket 2nd Edition.

Most everything, including the housing, is new. HP listened to its Sprocket user base and boldly released the new Sprocket in colors that information technology thinks will appeal to that demographic. HP will also offer some matching carrying cases and other accessories, some of which are pictured below. I did not take the opportunity to play with these earlier posting time.

The previous Sprocket’south major shortcomings—flaky connectivity and so-so output—are no longer issues, and several new features take been introduced (even though some of them, like the iii-user network and impress-queuing features, are half-broiled). Plus, the Sprocket 2nd Edition costs less to buy and apply than the previous Sprocket and several competing models.

For at present, until some other portable photo printer leaps ahead, the HP Sprocket 2nd Edition is the choice of its litter to snag. It’s our latest favorite pocket-size photo printer. Unless you prefer the larger output of the Sprocket Plus or Lifeprint 3×4.five models, information technology should exist yours, too.