Product Reviews

HP's C8180 is the company's top of the range all-in-one inkjet device. In addition to printing, scanning and copying, it has memory card slots, a PictBridge USB slot, and a DVD drive to allow you to print Lightscribe labels and back-up images from memory cards to CD or DVD.

The 3.5in LCD screen is touch-sensitive and so does away with many of the buttons you'd normally expect on the front of the device. Other notable features include wifi support, an Ethernet port and the ability to scan transparencies.

Removing the glossy white and silver C8180 from its box is straightforward enough, as is installing the ink tanks. The rest of the installation process, though straightforward is time consuming and often frustrating. With the six ink tanks in place, the printer ran through an initialisation routine which resulted in four minutes of grunts and whines (from the C8180 not the reviewer).

While that's going on, you can at least set about the task of installing the drivers and associated software, all 232MB of it. We don't object to HP including a handful of applications and extras with the drivers, but we would like the opportunity to opt out of installing them. None presented themselves during the installation procedure. Even worse was that once installed, the software prompted us to register with HP. Choosing not to was a long-winded process involving several mouse clicks, unchecking pre-ticked boxes and selecting non-highlighted dialog box buttons. In other words, you have to take great care if you don't want to register.

Things improved greatly once we started using the C8180. The

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copy function worked very well and felt remarkably nippy. Scanning was also swift and we particularly liked the option to scan directly to a PDF, which opened immediately in Preview.

Printing was less speedy. In our tests, with quality set at Normal, an A4 page of text with 5% coverage took 39 seconds from the time we confirmed the print until the paper landed in the output tray. Printing 10 copies of the same document took 2 minutes 30 seconds. This would be less of an issue if the text quality was crisp and dark. Unfortunately, it was dark grey rather than black and not as crisp as it should have been. Thankfully, things were much better at Best quality, though with a significant speed hit - one print took 56 seconds.

Colour photos fared better. Our A4 photo montage Photoshop document was ready in 2 minutes 44 seconds and the quality, on HP's Premium Matte paper, was excellent. Colours were rich, there was no evidence of banding and colours transitioned smoothly. We'd be more than happy to use this as a photo printer.

All of our tests were carried out with a Mac connected by USB, but the C8180 can also connect to your wired or wireless network. It can also print directly from your PictBridge camera or memory card, and from a Bluetooth-enabled mobile phone. The touchscreen controls are easy to get to grips with and the menu system has been well thought out.

The optical drive on the C8180 is an interesting twist, but we're not convinced that it's more than a novelty. Even with support for colour, LightScribe is far less satisfying than printing onto a disc which has a factory-applied printable surface, and if you want to back up your images, using your Mac makes much more sense than burning them to disc on the C8180.

Stocking the Photosmart with a full set of standard size cartridges will set you back about £45, which is about average in terms of running costs.

There's a lot to like about this all-in-one device, and we were particularly pleased with the ease of setting up wireless printing and the quality of colour photographs. However, at over £250 it's expensive if you don't make use of the optical drive or on-printer editing features.