HP is trying to make its Photosmart C8180 stand out from the crowd and has included a DVD rewriter, a touchscreen, a transparency scanner and Bluetooth facility .
In the process, though, it’s pumped up the price to just under £200 , this is quite a lot for a photo all-in-one.
The adjustable control panel, which folds out from the front of the machine , has just five buttons, mainly because the large, 89mm LCD screen is touch sensitive. The menu system is navigated entirely via touch-buttons, although the sensitivity of the screen leaves a little to be deired and it’s easy to select the wrong option.
To the right 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 pop out on the lid of the two trays.
A couple of cunning 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 useful 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 .
On the back 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 it’s turned on , 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 just 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 speeds . A 15 x 10cm photo at standard caliber, which is more than good enough for general-purpose images, took about 45 seconds from our test PC and was even quicker, at about 37 seconds, from an SD card or a PictBridge camera .
Underneath the memory card slots is the notebook-style DVD rewriter. You can transfer image files directly from a memory card to this drive and print from any DVD or CD disc containing images in Jpeg or Tiff formats. The drive also supports LightScribe, too, so you can label discs directly.
Print quality from the Photosmart C8180 wasn’t as good as we would have hoped , 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 fairly smooth. Photo prints were reasonable , 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. Cheap printer ink cartridges are available in the form of compatible cartridges which could offer substantial savings.
So, for our overall verdict , apart from the poor black print, this machine has just about all the bells and whistles a photo enthusiast could want .
