It's a sign of times that increasing numbers of high street photo printing shops are closing with the advent of vastly improved digital cameras, software and printers which mean that the whole process, from snapping to editing and publishing, can be carried out at home.

The one area where outside labs have had a chance is in the professional and serious amateur division where the requisite printers have either been too expensive or lacking in refined quality. Now even that is changing and HP's latest, the Photosmart Pro B9180, is aimed squarely at this market.

This printer is a heavyweight in every sense. Weighing over 17kg, you'll need a solid desk to support this silver and black monster. It uses the latest Vivera pigment inks in eight separate cartridges (including Photo Black, Matte Black and Light Grey) and they are guaranteed to be fade resistant for more than 200 years. Four print-heads also have to be installed before you start but, as with most HP products, this is simplicity itself.

Designed to print everything from letter and 3 x 5 to A3+, you have a main tray for the smaller, more regular size paper and a 'specialty media tray' which is designed for thick and/or rigid media up to 1.5mm. Supported paper types include cardstock, canvas and watercolour paper and the box contains an A3+ sample pack of these as well as HP Advanced Glossy and Satin-matt photo paper and a couple of specialist art papers. The big advantage of the specialty tray is that it keeps the material flat as it's printing, simply feeding the result out of the back of the machine.

What is going to blow the socks off the professional photographer is the quality of the results. The accuracy of the reproduction and the sharpness, vibrancy and quality of the colours is due to HP's new "densitometric closed loop colour calibration system" which scans printer-generated colour targets and measures colour density, then adjusts its output accordingly.

In addition, there's a range of colour management settings included in the supplied software which allows you to make any further adjustments or editing you deem necessary to your final picture. Particularly welcome is the HP Photosmart Pro plug-in for Adobe Photoshop, which provides a single dialogue box for colour management and other print settings. There's also a detection system that compensates when a nozzle's not working, while alerting you to the problem.

Networking is possible through the Ethernet port and print speeds are above average (HP claims to print 19 x 13-inch photos in 1.5 minutes and 6 x 4-inch prints in 10 seconds, but those are draft copies). The only minor disappointment is the power lead which is ridiculously short, but in every other department, serious photographers should be over the moon.

For professional photographers and serious amateurs, this is the printer you've been waiting for, with excellent colour reproduction on a variety of media formats up to A3+ size.