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The Hp Photosmart C8180 certainly stands out in terms of features, it has a DVD rewriter, a touchscreen, a transparency scanner and Bluetooth
.
In the process, though, it’s pumped up the price to just under £200 , which is a lot for a photo all-in-one.
The adjustable control panel, which folds out from the front , only has five buttons, this due to the 89mm LCD screen being touch sensitive. The menu system is navigated entirely via touch-buttons, although the sensitivity of the screen isn’t wonderful and it’s easy to select the wrong option.
On the right hand side of the control panel are four memory card slots and a PictBridge socket, which can double up as a connector for USB drives. There are two paper trays, with a small, powered photo tray positioned above a 100-sheet one for A4 plain paper. Finished prints end up on the lid of the two trays.
A couple of nice extras are the built-in templates and the transparency adaptor in the lid of the scanner. Templates are an obvious idea and one that other makers have used to good effect. Basically, you can print out your own lined, graph, music manuscript or To Do lists directly from the machine. Given the price of ink cartridges, this isn’t a cost-effective alternative to a stationery pad, but it could be of value as an emergency homework resource. Unclip the white backing pad on the bottom of scanner lid and you have a transparency scanner that will take individual slides or a strip of 35mm film. There’s a backlight built into the lid, even though it’s very slim, and you can scan these types of media at up to 9600ppi, which is quite impressive .
On the rear of the machine there are USB and Ethernet connections , the machine is fully wifi compatible and making a connection is a simple, two-part process: make the router aware of the Photosmart C8180 and then look it up as an available wireless printer to connect with Bonjour . Bluetooth is also built into the machine , though it isn’t enabled by default. Once enables , you can link to the machine from a phone or camera and print directly from that.
Plain paper print times weren’t particularly explosive , with our 10-page black text print taking a little under two minutes. The text and colour graphics print ran at about half the speed of the black text job, but these sluggish speeds are compensated for by the photo print times . A 15 x 10cm photo at standard caliber, which is plenty good enough for general-purpose images, took about 45 seconds from our test PC and was even quicker, at about 37 seconds, from a camera or memory card .
Underneath the memory card slots is the notebook-style DVD rewriter. You can transfer image files directly from memory card to this drive and print from any DVD or CD disc containing images in Jpeg or Tiff formats. The drive supports LightScribe, too, so you can label discs directly.
Print quality from the Photosmart C8180 wasn’t as good as we’ve come to expect from HP , particularly on plain paper. Although it can print at up to 1200dpi, black text was notably spiky where ink had run into the paper nap. Colour graphics, however, were bright and relatively smooth. Photo prints were ok , although, again, darker areas of an image tended to black out.
The six HP ink cartridges are reasonably priced and give costs per page of 2.7p for black and 6.1p the colour. Both these figures are at the lower end of the range in this section of the all-in-one market.
Ink cartridges for HP Photosmart C8180 are numbered as 363, and come in black, cyan, yellow, magenta, light magenta & light cyan.
Overall, then , apart from the poor black print, this machine has just about all the bells and whistles a photo enthusiast could want .