Product Reviews

The Photosmart C5180 is an all-in-one printer/scanner/copier that HP claims offers the 'world's fastest photo printing speeds'. That speed, according to the company, means outputting a 6 x 4in photo 'as fast as 12 seconds'. Sadly, the fastest we could manage was 53 seconds.

In addition to print speed, the C5180 is notable for having an Ethernet connection alongside its USB 2 port, employing HP's Vivera six-ink system and having a whole host of buttons along its front edge to enable you to operate its features without resorting to using your Mac.

As well as the plethora of buttons, the C5180 has a 2.4in LCD, memory card slots for all the popular formats and a pair of input trays.

In use, the C5180 was rather disappointing. While photo print quality was excellent at the highest-quality setting and on HP's best paper, everything else we printed had faults. Photo quality at the printer's default settings with paper selection set to automatic produced results that would be disappointing from a £50 6 x 4in printer, let alone a £200 all-in-one. Blacks were oversaturated to the point where everything beyond mid-grey was rendered black, and colour gradients were anything but smooth. Every print took longer to dry than we'd expect and remained sticky for several minutes.

Text quality was poor, with ink bleeding into the paper and occasionally smudging on its way out of the printer.

Finally, print speed failed to live up to HP's claims. A 6 x 4in print at best quality took just under two minutes, whether it was printed from a memory card or our Mac: at fast draft quality, it took 53 seconds, but the result was a poor print. Two A4 text pages took 47 seconds to land in the output tray at automatic quality. Reducing the quality to fast draft sped the output up to 17 seconds, but the result was suitable only for internal copy proofing.

At £200, the HP Photosmart C5180 simply isn't value for money, and won't trouble the competition.