Product Reviews

HP's Photosmart C8180 MFP is designed with graphic and photographic work in mind. It uses a six-ink system, which is ideal for photo printing. A PictBridge port and a range of memory card slots allow you to print your digital photos without using a computer, and built-in Bluetooth lets you send pictures to it from camera phones. There's even an integrated DVD writer for burning photos directly to disc. LightScribe support means it can burn a label on to the face of the disc.

You can print from a PC via 801.11b/g wireless networking, but the C8180 also has USB2 and 10/100 Ethernet ports. Animated instructions on a large 3in touch screen take you through every step of configuring the printer and installing the cartridge. Separate trays for plain and photo paper pull out for easy loading, and plastic guides hold the paper in place. The main tray can hold 100 pages of A4, while 20 sheets of 6x4 or 7x5in paper fit in the photo tray.

This is the first MFP we've seen that can scan transparencies; the transparency frame has space for four mounted slides or a strip of six negatives. With an optical resolution of 9,600x9,600dpi and a maximum 48-bit colour depth, the scanner should be capable of great quality. Unfortunately, its software interface, like many other HP scanners we've reviewed, is poorly designed and irritating to use. It closes after each scan and doesn't retain previews or settings. Transparency scanning feels like an after-thought. Unlike the polished interfaces used by Epson and Canon, HP's scanner driver doesn't create separate thumbnail images of each frame.

Scan

Low-resolution scans took just a few seconds and our 1,200dpi photo scan took one minute 41 seconds, but high-resolution scans were far slower. A single 35mm negative at 2,400dpi took almost half an hour. Photos at the maximum resolution of 4,800x1,200dpi looked great, but we had to wait several minutes for prints to dry. We had to wait 18 minutes 24 seconds for six 6x4in photos, and seven minutes 12 seconds for two 10x8in pictures. Yellow tones were slightly oversaturated, but the overall effect was barely noticeable. Photo quality was fine, with no banding and very little graininess.

Print quality wasn't as good in mixed colour documents. Dark images looked grey and speckled at standard quality. Text was easy to read, despite slightly rough edges. The colour print speed of 2ppm is typical for an inkjet MFP.

One of the C8180's best features is a fast, high-quality draft mode, which is ideal for day-to-day printing. Draft text was clearly defined and printed at a phenomenal 15.3ppm. Normal-quality text printed at a rather sluggish 4.5ppm, but was dark and beautifully sharp, with small font reproduction that rivalled many printers in this month's mono laser Labs.

Copy quality was mediocre. Text reproduction was good, but images in mono copies were dark and inconsistently shaded, and colour image copies were yellowish.

The Photosmart C8180 is a good printer, with excellent photo and text quality. It's easy to connect to your PC directly or across a wired or wireless network, and it can print digital photos from almost any source. Transparency scanning is a great feature, but the scanner is let down by an irritating interface and painfully slow high-resolution scans. It has every feature you could want, but £259 is a lot of money and we expect few people will want an integrated DVD writer. For this sort of money, you could buy a better-quality scanner and printer separately.