Product Reviews

HP's Photosmart C5180 is based on the same inkjet print engine as the Photosmart D7160 printer, which won our Best Buy award in What's New, Shopper January 2007. The multifunctional C5180 combines this printer with a 2,400 dots per inch (dpi) scanner, and is aimed at creative users and digital photographers.

The C5180's memory card reader is compatible with all the formats commonly used by digital cameras. It has a 6.1cm colour screen and a straightforward menu system. There are some simple photo-editing options available on the printer, including a red-eye fix option that worked on our test image. Direct photo prints are quick at the default setting, with six 6x4in prints from an SD card taking just two minutes and 36 seconds. The C5180 has a regular USB interface and a wired Ethernet port, so you can connect directly, or use a router to share it between users. You can print and scan over the network connection. HP's setup program detected the C5180 over our network and makes the installation easy no matter which interface you choose.

As we'd expect, given its similarity to the D7160, the C5180's

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printer performed strongly across our print tests. At its highest quality, it produced six 6x4in photos in less than eight minutes. Though this is much slower than its direct prints, it's very fast for an inkjet, and the images were sharper and had less grain. It's also a capable plain-paper printer, delivering draft text and our colour Normal speed document at an impressive rate for an inkjet.

Unfortunately, the C5180's scanner lets it down. It has a high optical resolution, but the images it captured looked processed and artificial when viewed at 100 per cent zoom, even though we turned off the default sharpening option. HP's clunky TWAIN interface doesn't automatically remember settings or cache preview images between individual captures, and can make scanning frustrating. It's fast, however, with previews taking eight seconds via a USB connection, or 20.5 seconds over the network. High-resolution images that we scanned over a network connection were blocky when compared to those captured over USB. This was because the scanner was producing a lower-resolution scan to keep down network traffic.

Black-only copies made at the default settings took just 34 seconds, but they looked faint and stripy. Best-quality results were a big improvement, though. Default colour copies appeared at the same rate and were more solid, but had a yellowish tint we couldn't fix by changing quality and paper settings.

The C5180 is attractive, easy to install and affordable to run. It's a capable printer, but makes disappointing scans and copies. It's good value for a network-capable multifunction peripheral, but it isn't a great choice if you'll be doing lots of high-resolution scanning.