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Where to buy HP Photosmart C8180 All-in-One
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CNET Editors' review - HP Photosmart C8180 All-in-One
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CNET Editor's rating: 7.0 out of 10
Reviewed by Justin Yu Review date: 06/04/08 The good: Pleasing color and text prints; dual paper feed trays; best in class Wi-Fi set up; Bluetooth connectivity; direct archiving with built-in LightScribe DVD drive. The bad: Lacks auto-document feeder and fax machine; expensive; very slow prints; grayscale scans lack definition. The bottom line: The C8180 multifunctional printer is an excellent choice for photo enthusiasts. It prints high-quality text and photos at a heavy price: the printer is s...l...o...w. If you always choose quality over speed, the c8180 will be a worthwhile addition to your digital toolshed. At $400, the Photosmart C8180 sits in Hewlett-Packard's lineup as one of its most expensive All-in-One (AIO) players. This printer, scanner, and copier has a suite of features for the amateur photo enthusiast that includes a touch-screen display, built-in Wi-Fi, Bluetooth connectivity, a slide scanner, and a dual paper feed tray, but it's not without a few missteps. The photo quality is better than average and the hardware is well-designed, but the lack of an auto-document feeder (ADF) and painfully slow print speed prevent us from giving this otherwise excellent printer an Editors' Choice award. Design and featuresThe design of the C8180 is similar to the rest of the printers in the Photosmart series, but this particular model has a few notable hardware additions that you won't find in most All-in-Ones. Unlike most printers, the C8180 has a swiveled touch screen that lets you control all the software functions including photo editing, wireless setup and management, and scanning jobs. The touch screen eliminates button clutter and frees up the rest of the front panel for simple buttons that control one-touch red-eye removal as well as a few others for start, stop, and cancel. The front of the C8180 also has a memory card bay with slots for Compact Flash, xD, SD/MMC, and Memory Stick cards. Although HP flaunts the C8180 as a full-featured AIO for the home and office, it lacks a fax machine and an auto-document feeder that you can find on other AIOs for less money. You'll also notice a unique hardware feature on the front of the C8180: a LightScribe drive that lets you archive your data directly from a USB key or an external memory card to a CD/DVD. We're not disputing its utility, but we wish HP could have found a way to include the drive alongside an ADF and fax instead of omitting them entirely. In either case, we must compliment HP on the build quality and design of the C8180. The rounded corners and silver/white overlay contribute to its overall appeal; this printer will look great alongside any desk setup. You have three options for connecting your computer to the printer: wired via the included USB cable, Bluetooth, or Wi-Fi. We can confidently state that the Photosmart C8180 is the easiest Wi-Fi printer we've used to date. Other printers make you pour through pages and pages of instructions and ultimately force you to set up the connection via an ad-hoc network, but the C8180 distills the process down to a simple pairing between the printer and your computer. In fact, there are no onscreen instructions; you set everything up through the digital LCD on the faceplate itself. From open box to first print, the entire Wi-Fi setup took less than 5 minutes. Another unique feature to the C8180 is its dual paper input tray. This is bound to be one of those, "Why didn't we think of that?" headaches for HP's competitors, and it really is genius--the C8180 has two separate paper trays: one for larger 8.5-by-11 inch paper and another for smaller 4-by-6-inch media. This small hardware addition saves time and desk space by allowing the user to manually select which paper tray will spool from the device, but most of the time the C8180 will choose automatically depending on the job. The C8180 uses six separate ink cartridges (black, light cyan, light magenta, cyan, magenta, and yellow) and each has its own dedicated bay underneath the hood. We're happy to see that each cartridge is easily replaceable at a fairly reasonable price. Even though each color costs the same, the page yields vary immensely, so for our calculations we used black and yellow, which apparently yield the most pages. A black ink cartridge costs $18 and will yield 660 pages, which comes out to 2.7 cents per page and a yellow cartridge costs $10 for 490 pages, or 2 cents a page. Both are reasonable for a photo printer at this price.
Performance Speed test comparison (in pages per minute)
(Longer bars indicate better performance)
HP Photosmart C8180
0.66
2.47
4.37
Thankfully, there's more to be said for the HP's photo quality than its print speed. The text documents we tested on the C8180 came out very clear with bright, outstanding colors and dark black lines. The color spread came out even with zero fuzziness or jagged edges, even at smaller points. The printer also produced very pleasing 4x6-inch photos with accurate color reproduction in skin tone and an even hue across the page. Some of the lighter colors appear undersaturated, even on HP's own Premium Glossy Photo Paper, but overall these prints will satisfy some of the most nitpicky photo enthusiasts. Like many of the printers in HP's Photosmart series, the C8180 produces better quality color scans than grayscales. We noticed a significant amount of compression in the grayscale scans with serious gradation issues at the dark end of the spectrum. This problem is almost nonexistent when scanning color prints, where we were actually impressed with the level of evident detail and representation.
Service and support Find out more about how we test printers. (Originally posted on CNET Reviews)User opinions - HP Photosmart C8180 All-in-One
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Good6.8out of 10
Average user rating from 5 users
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3 out of 10 - Poor 16 out of 16 users found this user opinion helpful. 8 out of 10 - Excellent 9 out of 10 users found this user opinion helpful. 1 out of 10 - Abysmal 1 out of 1 users found this user opinion helpful. 3 out of 10 - Poor 1 out of 1 users found this user opinion helpful. 9 out of 10 - Spectacular 1 out of 1 users found this user opinion helpful. 5 out of 10 - Average 1 out of 1 users found this user opinion helpful. 6 out of 10 - Good 9 out of 10 - Spectacular Full specifications - HP Photosmart C8180 All-in-One
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Manufacturer:
HP
Part number: L2526A#ABA
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