HP Photosmart C5180

This printer/scanner/copier is clearly aimed at the home office end of the market - certainly in terms of cost as I got mine for a measly 160 quid with a bonus paper pack and extra cartridges. The other thing that makes it more suitable for the SoHo market is the speed which is fast but not up to scratch for the big offices. To be fair though that's because its an inkjet and not because of machine.

Quality wise, this thing is brilliant. The 6 cartridge system produces great photo quality and having a larger black reservoir means day-to-day stuff doesn't suffer either. It has interfaces galore and has taken pretty much any card I have - also has a network interface (at this price?) which supports printing and scanning.

HP have clearly put a lot of thought into user experience here. Scanning from the web interface, printing from media cards, dedicated photo paper tray, simple one press copy buttons and an easy photo review and print system without even turning your computer on all make this a dream to use. But the thing that shows attention to detail for me is that the cartridges can only go in one way round and each has a shape symbol so even the most colour-confused of us can tell whether the light cyan or cyan cartridge needs replacing.

Even if that were not enough, the real deal-maker for me is that it works perfectly out of the box with Linux (install HPLIP).

Brilliant! Top piece of kit.

I plumped for an HP printer as these seemed to be the only ones with a separate tray for photo papers, I purchased this printer to replace a previous model that although still works well is getting a bit dated, printing on photo on the previous model was very hit and miss, as the paper had to be fed into a special slot which did not always work.

On the C5180 you stack upto 20 or so photo cards. into a dedicated tray. when printing you can specify this tray and the printer rather neatly draws this tray into the machine and prints your photos in accordance with your preferences.

Using 5 separate colour cartridges seems to give much better results as the output looks just as good as normal photos.

I was very pleased overall with the printer, although setting it up was slightly problematical. my advice to anyone is to follow the advice given to close all other programs and to disable your virus software, I use Kaspersky and this caused no end of problems and meant I had to backout the set up (thankfully done automatically by the HP software) and re install again

Scanning is much faster then my previous cannon standalone scanner.

In summary this is a very neat, quite running machine that I would recommend.

A friend of mine recently bought the same HP C5180 and I had him perform the same experimental photo prints and his results look equally bad. If I had it to do over again I would have gone with the Canon 601.

My Epson CX5400 finally gave up the ghost after 3 years of exemplary service and after extensive research I settled on the HP C5180 to fill the void. We have a suite of HP printers at work and I've always been amazed at their speed and quality. With the added feature of built-in print heads (so our technician tells me) I felt sure an HP multi-function would be a great choice.

Setting up with my G5 Mac was simple - compatible driver discs included - although as usual they come with a slew of extras that are fairly pointless if you run Photoshop and they take an age to install.

I ran through a few tests, scanning quality was excellent and made quick work of an old photo at 600 dpi. Photocopying in colour was also efficient and at respectable speed.

Then I tried printing from a series of files that make up 90% of my usage.

Basically it bleeds all over the page! Luckily the software allows you to manage the amount of ink used, but even on the lowest setting, documents that have two colours overlaid seem to bleed together like watercolour paint. I print a lot of MS Word documents - often with some colour involved, but not documents that warrant inkjet quality paper. I'm using the same paper stock that gives great results at work, but the quality is just not there on the C5180.

Greyscales are ok, and weirdly enough, photos printed using the photocard tray show no blurring or poor rendering.

Coupled with extremely slow spooling of .pdfs from Acrobat, this makes the C5180 a poor purchase in my eyes. You expect to lose some quality in each aspect of a multifunction machine, but you should expect it to excel in its primary function - which is as a printer. The C5180 simply fails to do this.