HP Deskjet F380 All-In-One (PCMAG)

The HP Deskjet F380 All-In-One (AIO) is a distinctly low-end AIO intended for home use or light-duty home office use.

Prints, copies, and scans. Low price.

Slow. Below-par output quality. No fax support. No automatic document feeder.

$79.00

In almost every way that matters—both good and bad—the HP Deskjet F380 All-in-One ($79 direct) is a minimalist package, limited to printing, scanning, and copying, and intended for light-duty use in a home or home office. It boasts a low price tag and small size, but there's no fax modem and no automatic document feeder. Most important, it's hobbled by subpar output quality and even worse speed.

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The F380 measures a compact 6.7 by 16.8 by 10.2 inches (HWD), making it small enough that I'd be willing to share a desk with it. It also lays claim to the kind of sleek good looks that fit nicely in a home or home-office setting, where décor matters. Setup is mostly standard fare, but with an interesting twist I've seen in only a few AIOs: After you connect the power cord, load paper, and load the ink cartridges, the F380 prints an alignment page. You then slap the page on the flatbed scanner, the F380 scans the page, and it uses what it sees to align the printheads. You can then run the automated setup routine and plug in the USB cable.

I don't expect an $80 AIO to win any awards for speed, but the F380 does badly even for its price range. I timed it at a total 32 minutes 18 seconds on our business applications suite test (timed with QualityLogic's hardware and software, www.qualitylogic.com). HP's own PSC 1510 All-In-One, which costs only about $20 more, did far better, at 18:00. And even the less-expensive Dell Photo All-In-One Printer 924 came in at 19:47. The relative speed was even worse for photos, with the F380 averaging 9:15 for each 4-by-6 and 24:10 for each 8-by-10. In comparison, the PSC 1510 averaged 1:21 and 3:06, respectively, and the Dell 924 averaged 1:14 and 2:42.

There's one factor here that can make the F380 a little faster, at least for photos. Like many ink jets, it ships with a black cartridge and a tricolor cartridge for printing with black, cyan, yellow, and magenta. But you can replace the black cartridge with a photo cartridge for printing photos in six colors. In fact, all three of these AIOs can print with either four or six colors, and the speeds in our tests are for six-color printing. With the F380, however, there isn't much difference in photo quality between the two modes. So you might reasonably choose to print exclusively with four colors—especially since the print time is cut in half, averaging 4:46 for each 4-by-6 and 12:07 for each 8-by-10. That's still far slower than the PSC 1510 and Dell 924, but it's a big improvement over printing with six ink colors.

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Given how slow the F380 is, it would help if the output were worth waiting for. But the quality is below par for an ink jet, especially for text and graphics. The text is nothing to write home about, although it's good enough to write home with. More than half of our test fonts were easily readable at 5 points, and some were easily readable at 4 points, even though edges were not as crisp as I'd like. Two heavily stylized fonts with thick strokes couldn't qualify as easily readable even at 12 points. Even so, the quality is good enough for things such as schoolwork or even business use, as long as you don't have an unusual need for small fonts or insist on crisp, clean characters to project a fully professional image.

Graphics quality is good enough for internal business use, but no better. More than any other printer I can remember seeing recently, the F380 has a tendency to make thin lines disappear or turn them into dashed lines. I also saw some posterization (sudden changes in shading that should change smoothly). I certainly wouldn't hand the output to a client I was trying to impress.

Photo quality is better than text and graphics relative to other ink jets, with some photos approaching true photo quality. Among other issues, however, I saw obvious tints in some photos—white clouds turning pink, for example. Another problem is that, as is typical with an ink jet printer, the photos aren't waterproof, even after drying, which means they're okay for framing safely behind glass, but you wouldn't want to pass them around for people to look at.

One exception to the HP Deskjet F380 All-In-One's minimalist approach is that the scanner has an optical resolution of 1,200 pixels per inch, which is high enough to let you scan a photo and enlarge it. Combined with the reasonably good photo output, this makes it a potentially good choice if you're interested primarily in scanning and printing photos, but it's hard to recommend it otherwise.

See how the HP Deskjet F380 All-In-One measures up to similar machines in our all-in-one printer comparison chart.

Benchmark Test Results
Check out the HP Deskjet F380 All-In-One's test results .